Today. However, it's my great pleasure to welcome to the group.
Professor Martin Cook is the Stockdale Professor of Professional Military Ethics at the United States Naval War College in Rhode Island.
He has published broadly and widely on pretty much every important issue within the ethics of war.
He's also one of the founding editor of the Journal of Military Ethics, which is what many of you will know.
And he's what I think you can say a little bit about his background,
but he's also one of the significant things about him is that he is trained both as a philosopher and as a theologian.
And that, I think will be informing some of the remarks is going to come yesterday, said Martin Wolf.
Thanks for that. Well, I thought I would start.
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.
I on the Air Force Brat, as we say in the United States.
So I grew up entirely on Air Force bases in Dublin, about 15.
My father was a bomber pilot, the strategic architects of nuclear weapons in the fifties and sixties.
So you might imagine that he was he made a considerable impression on me.
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.
That's literally true.
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.
That's probably it. So that was a very formative experience for me.
I did my education in philosophy as there was and also in religious studies as well as classics.
And for the first half of my career, I had a purely civilian academic career.
I taught at the College of William and Mary and then for nearly 20 years as secretary of state of California.
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?
I like to be a visiting professor at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
So having just gotten tenure, I thought, what the heck, why not do something else?
My family's from Colorado anyway, so I went there for a year and that was the year 1991, 92.
Now, those of you who remember your history, remember that was the first Gulf War. So while I was in philosophy department,
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.
One pilot from was participant in the Highway of Death.
You young people may not remember it,
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.
In fact, it is in many respects the political end of the war.
Colin Powell saw those pictures and thought, you know, we are going to have to stop this real quick.
So we wrote a paper on what actually happened then, and that was my first paper on military ethics.
And I quickly discovered that this is a field that is not well occupied by people who could span these worlds.
Right. That's the knowledge of the military, who have some knowledge of normative ethics, who are interested in both.
And so increasingly, my career evolved in the direction of writing and thinking in that area.
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.
What the heck theory I applied to go there. I was a little bored and I took that position.
No, you're not familiar with the system of professional military education that states the war.
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,
and they'll go through an academy or a reserve officer training program as a pre commissioning level.
Then they will go to Captain Low three grade, they'll go to a command staff school,
and then at about 23 years of service at the rank of lieutenant colonel or so, they'll go to a war college.
So this is sort of maybe general school.
So going to Carlisle turned out to be a wonderful experience for me in the sense that I learned so much from my students.
Most of my students have been naive managers. Almost all of them had combat experience.
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.
People have a lot of experience that you've been drawing in the classroom.
And it's going to be a wonderful learning experience for me that it should just go quickly.
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.
So in some ways the secret of success has been to find a really small pond and be a reasonably good sized fisherman, right?
So the number of people who do military ethics in the way that I'm talking about,
mainly in close proximity to people actually doing the professional stuff is very few military ethics conferences like the CIA in Castlebar,
you know right up the. Usual suspects. So that's what I'm doing.
So, yeah. Now, another thing about this is much earlier in my life,
when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I ended up teaching at a medical school.
I came by accident, a brand new medical ethics program.
Medical ethics was just getting started, really, in the early seventies. And I quickly discovered something that stayed with me all my life,
which is you can't walk from the philosophy department across the street to the med
school and talk the way you were talking that was important and get any traction at all.
You have no credibility with them. Their eyes glaze over quickly.
There is interested in theory, but only if it scratches an itch they know they've got.
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.
So that basic thought has stayed with me throughout.
And that's sort of the theme I want to develop in some of this talk, and I hope it'll be a dialogue.
So if you have a question at any point, please program. In fact, let me just start now.
Any question about what you already said? Okay.
Now, as David indicated, he started the Journal of Military Ethics. It'll be ten years ago this fall.
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.
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.
But what they typically are intra philosopher arguments with each other.
And one of our standards of what we want to put in the journal is, would this be of interest to a thoughtful journal?
Would a thoughtful journal possibly pick this up and find it helpful?
In fact, we published an editorial at the beginning of the Journal as as just this year saying,
what do we think all of your efforts actually is and what do we think it uses, you know?
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.
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.
You know, have fun with it, but it's not professional.
So what I want to talk about first is really what do we mean by profession?
Now, in the U.S. military, this has become a very hot topic.
Admiral Mullen, who is our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, convened a meeting in Washington about six weeks ago.
I don't think anything like this has ever happened in history of the U.S. military is about 50 people in a room.
And he said, I'm very worried about this. We had two major things after ten years of war.
Do we know who we are? We've seen that we're capable of doing some pretty bad things.
We really need to reflect on this. And he said, I was a young officer in Vietnam.
I know what a really broken military looks like.
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.
We're already in pretty bad shape in practical terms, in terms of broken equipment and and stretched out soldiers.
And, you know, most captains, the military has 30 year olds already been to Afghanistan or Iraq three times.
So this is this is an incredible toll that we're taking on our people be a long time to recover from.
The other thing he said was, we, the military, not all the American people and the American people don't know us.
And I think that's increasingly true, as you probably know.
The United States, which the United States switched to an all volunteer or all recruited force in 1973.
So we have nothing but volunteers. So you can imagine that there's tracks in a couple of ways.
You get people who needed who need a job in the enlisted ranks and in the officer corps.
It's become largely a family business. Now that is it.
Most officers are the sons and grandsons of previous officers that's out of work.
So that's a very isolated little community and it quickly falls into group thing.
So about 12 years ago, a very intelligent, retired Army colonel with a Ph.D. teaching at West Point,
they've done Snyder started a project called The Future of the Army Professional Project.
You're not even on the back of something right into this literature.
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,
I told my unit when we went. Force protection is our major job over here.
There's nothing in the Balkans worth anybody getting hurt.
And Don, being an experienced combat officer sort of threw something to the ceiling and said,
when did accomplishing the mission come to be subordinate to protecting our own forces?
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?
Right. And it through the army, really, just like those missions at the time.
So he started this project saying, what are our officers?
Are they professionals? Or as he'd like to put it, or are they merely obedient bureaucrats?
And what difference would it make? And so the project had been about 50 scholars or so of about two years.
It culminated in a very good book, I think maybe called The Future of the Army Profession.
And he said, look, drawing in the sociology literature, he said, professions are characterised by a number of things.
I won't get all of them, but first of all, they have a body of abstract knowledge,
and it's that it's the part of the ethical obligation of the profession,
both to know the existing body knowledge and to develop an adaptive for future applicability.
And it's abstract knowledge because it's applied at discretion.
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.
Secondly, professions are. Characterised by corporate earnings.
That is, they maintain their own standards.
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.
It's very rare that the Senate actually looked by name, but it is a very, very high rank.
So officers decide who gets in, who gets out and is promoted, who gets what job, who gets rewarded.
So it's corporate in that way. It has its own ethic and is expected to both future and enforce that.
And it has a strong sense of what its own expertise is.
So and the unequal dialogue that goes on between military professionals and civilian leaders.
Part of the job is to make sure that they clearly articulate something from their body of expertise,
to guide the civilians, to make the right decision about what to do.
So professional ethics in that sense is meant in that kind of narrow way.
And how does it help address the practitioner to make them more self aware of their professional status?
Now that's a pretty important point. So let me start see if there's any conversation we need to have about that.
Pretty quickly. I'll do a little historically. Classically in the West.
There were only three professions by the time in the late Middle Ages, early the early March period,
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.
So how are you guys using it? So anybody want to take a guess what the three classical professions were?
The church, church clergy law.
And that's exactly right. What do those three have in common that makes them different from other kinds of jobs?
Specific audit of their corporate in the section, which I thought was one of the important thing that I didn't mention already.
They have a position of high social trust for something that's very important.
Right.
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.
And we realise that you will have a unique body of expertise.
And in exchange for that, we're going to give you these privileges that we don't give most other people.
Right. And that relationship exists only so long as we trust you.
Right. Only so long as the society needs to trust.
Can societies lose trust in professions? Absolutely.
When I was in college, my first freshman year with the Vietnam War, we invaded Cambodia.
Students were killed at Kent State University. It became impossible to walk across my campus in an ROTC uniform.
I got it in logic because it was impossible to go to class after midterms because of the burning of the buildings.
So. So you want to see a complete loss of confidence, a professional you can never see in modern America.
Accountancy just went through this surgery like you're plenty of years. Okay.
Okay. So if we think about military officers in professional terms,
one of the consequences of the Snyder project over the course of ten or 12 years is the
U.S. Army has completely embraced this logic of professionalism to the point that there
are now official Army doctrine statements on the profession this coming year coming directly
from the chief of the staff for the Army is the Year of the Army professional ethic.
All of the U.S. Army General Officer Corps is now speaking this vocabulary in a non-trivial way.
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.
One of the most heated debates is the question you just asked, right?
Because, for example, Admiral Mullen conference, a very senior Marine master sergeant, gave an impassioned argument that at least senior NCO,
that members of the profession of one of the colonels from West Point said, with all due respect, not really.
You don't have the body of professional knowledge. You are implementers of the professional judgement of the officer.
It turned out very quickly. If you're watching or listening to this, there's some equivocation on the term professional going on here.
Right. On the one hand, there's this kind of technical sociological definition that I just gave it,
which is a pretty good argument that only the officers really are that.
Right. On the other hand, there's also a sort of just general term of phrase use of the term.
Right, and which people are offended if you say, well,
you're not really professional because in fact, military people have a very small world vocabulary.
There are basically two words in it. Professional and integrity.
Okay. So you use the word professional to phrase anything you like and you say unprofessional for anything you don't like.
Everything from a messy desk to do, not clean your weapon properly.
And you say integrity is if that explains everything.
And of course, it's never spelled out what that means, but it's filled with water implicitly.
Those are the two favourite world words. So that's where you very quickly get into this equivocation argument, right?
And I don't know how the Army is going to settle that.
I think right now there's a heated debate today in the Army because they're just rolling out this training program.
Okay.
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.
We've already seen some pretty deep trouble. So that's why it's working on a plea bargain around the edges.
Now, if you start thinking about military authorship as a profession,
it quickly becomes clear there's not necessarily just one of these to do professional ethics.
Well, you have to start by understanding the profession that are formed in a fairly finely nuanced way.
So let me give you something a couple of things to think about.
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.
Right. So in the Army, there's a distinction between the combat branches, infantry,
artillery and the combat service support branches like logistics and things like that.
And the prestige end of it are the pointy end of the spear parts of the right.
So that sort of sets the tone for the whole service.
And you have to get close to the service to begin to begin to understand that.
And sometimes these identities are in flux, right?
So, for example, artillery has played a pretty small role in Afghanistan and Iraq for obvious reasons.
And so artillery officers are feeling kind of like we're not getting much respect.
Right. So when you start to try to understand the internal dynamics of the army,
you have to get down to that level of detail to figure out what's going on with them.
Another problem for all military services is trying to get the right balance between their
inherently conservative nature and the fact that they need to adapt to a new environment.
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.
It did so because it tried to do Iraq the way it had been trained to do other things.
And it really didn't like counterinsurgency. In fact, the Army's not even talking about counterinsurgency after Vietnam.
I mean, in fact, the general idea there was never do that again or anything like that ever again.
And it was only when it was visibly failing that basically you had a change out of the senior officer corps in your,
you know, get rid of a whole cadre of people.
And guys like the Prius and McMaster, who were not getting promoted, suddenly get in because they're willing to adapt.
Now, the buzz in the Army is, are we all becoming the majority?
Jordan is squeezed.
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?
So for many years, when I first went work for the Army, they sent me out to the National Training Centre,
which is an enormous piece of desert out in California, and they practised for combined arms battle.
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.
And also it becomes like $1,000,000 a day who is trained. It's very impressive to look at one of these.
What were we training for? This is this is this is training to fight the Russians in the photograph.
That's what it took them quite a long time to realise that they need to start putting civilians
out there on the battlefield and Afghan villagers and make them side with the locals and,
you know, completely rework the training because if you're going to fight the way you trained.
Right. And we were training internally for the role.
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.
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
highly trained thoracic surgeon and suddenly you have a large public health emergency.
What you objectively need are low tech public health workers.
So you go to the surgeon and you say, Look, you're a physician, you're committed to treating patients objectively.
What what patients need right now is this low tech public health.
You can imagine, at least emotionally, a thoracic surgeon would push back yourself a little bit and say,
well, no, I have this very highly involved set of skills. I'm very reluctant to get rid of them.
And you might even say it might be legitimate for a small congressman to say we're
going to preserve these skills for the future when they're going to be needed again. Right.
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.
Right. Take, for example, you ever been to a cavalry base or to a formal event for the army?
The cavalry often show up with cowboy hats and spurs.
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.
Oh, no. And that's just there because that's the legacy of that branch.
And this part of understanding the profession is knowing when that's not so right.
It's not entirely so. It's a little bit farther to go to the other services.
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.
It's a it's going into its third as we speak.
Phase one was built on a theory of strategic bombing that was developed between World War One and World War Two,
that assumed that by bombing strategic nodes, either transport in manufacturing or aerial bombing of civilian populations,
there were arguments of between those two possibilities that you would either in war quickly or with the existence of nuclear weapons,
you would need to maintain mutually assured destruction. So the Air Force, my dad flew in was a mad for straight, mutually assured destruction.
And the Commander LeMay was so committed to that mission that he tried his very best to refuse to provide airpower to be enough,
because the other air airpower in Vietnam was a sideshow. We exist to deter the Russians.
And it was only when he continued to refuse to cooperate that that the civilian leadership finally said,
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.
So there's a very funny book from area where he called The Rise of the Fighter Generals, the documents around 73, 74.
Suddenly chiefs of a set of staff of the Air Force are fighter pilots instead of bomber pilots.
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,
and you wouldn't want to guess what the current one is. We just close air transport.
These are transport, right? But the reason is that does anybody see why I say the Air Force is about to
get a new kind of leadership and a new kind of a different kind of service?
What is the big thing that's going to change?
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?
People have. Just asking that question.
Why would he ever put you in the fetid airspace if you don't know?
As you probably know, the Air Force was was a poster child for unwillingness to adapt, right.
When the first weaponized predators were used who killed young children?
Here's the thing. CIA, the Air Force hated them.
Air Force didn't want them. Didn't want to fire them.
When the number of cadets graduate of the Air Force Academy going for UAV training exceeded the number going to manned aircraft for anything.
You couldn't believe the cultural stress that those guys.
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.
In fact, it turns out they do better on your knees if they don't have one.
And in fact, the Army says, what?
Why don't they don't have to be officers either, because the Army plays all of their duties with the enlisted people.
So the Air Force had only begun to start exercising any professional ethical judgement to get with this program and figure it out.
Right. One small example. When I just before I left the Air Force Academy few years ago,
we I was part of a small group that got a tasking from the air staff to tell us what the AFC,
which is the job designator code, ought to be for UAV pilots.
So we met for about six months talking about this question about a law report.
Was it entirely the wrong question? The question is not who operates that,
because probably very quickly that will largely be automated for the purposes of getting the aircraft from point A to point B.
That's not something you get a human being able to do. Right. The real question is,
how is the Air Force going to develop a cadre of officers who understand the
whole system of systems that unmanned vehicles are going to represent because,
hey, you're from now chief there for the chiefs of Air Force is a UAV guy.
Just do the math. I mean, it's got to happen right now.
Can you imagine the cultural stress as the service tries to adjust to all this?
And in fact, the whole rationale for an independent Air Force in the first place was to pin it on the strategic bombing theory.
But if you don't think you're going to do that, maybe you ought to put it back in the Army.
If it's doing close air support of the Marines, for example,
it's just like having their own army because they don't trust the Air Force to close air support.
So as General Scales used to say, Tell me why our Navy's army needs its own air force.
And the reason is because the Navy's army doesn't trust the air.
These are they're going to say, well, these are all professional ethics questions in a kind of complicated way.
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.
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,
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.
Well, they lost a few nukes, too, but that was the real issue, was this action,
their insistence on lobbying for the F-22, even though the second said, we're not going to build more than about 130.
They wouldn't do 360. And I thought, you know, what, are you going to fight with it?
It's a magnificent aeroplane. But, you know, if it gets to exactly where it used to be, better for them.
When's the last time that American pilots have an air to air engagement with anyone?
Vietnam. Americans have been floated, defended seriously, vigorously.
So it's a little bit becomes okay for the Navy.
I'm still learning Navy. Just waiting to speak to the Navy is not one service.
The Navy is a bunch of tribes. Surface warfare people, aviators and submariners are the three main tribes of.
They're very different cultures. They treat it.
They are trained, different kinds of officer, and they have trouble playing well together.
The baby has a big problem along the line, parallel to the Air Force from aircraft,
because that's been the primary weapon system since since World War Two.
How many of them have we got within the 11?
That means that at any given moment there are two or three of them. Right?
So what's the problem with an aircraft carrier? It's a very large target.
And if anybody has been reading their news lately, you know, the Chinese are developing excellent carriers,
thinking about how are you going to defend the network after it is determined, attacked by designers.
You can shoot down. A few of those missiles are cheap compared to aircraft carriers.
You can saturate any air strike. So an aircraft carrier is very obviously not a sustainable platform.
For the future. So what is. They seem to see denial.
Maybe it's hard to do. Some people have written that anything is on the surface of the water isn't safe.
So you better think about under the water with pretty much everything or lots of much smaller things.
Like the one ship building is called the Littoral Combat Electoral, but it is shallow water of positive things.
Instead of being a blue water navy, think about, you know, how you did in post Charlotte.
And by the way here an aircraft here is a crappy way to aeroplanes and no land
target anywhere because they don't have a very good range radio to refuel.
What? And by the way, I wait for humidity to defend airspace.
Anyway, when I just watch a bunch of you it is much smaller thing to accomplish much of the same thing.
So all all of this is meant to illustrate what I mean by the adaptability question and professional military ethics.
When you objectively can see a challenge,
it's part of your professional ethical obligation to be thinking about how are you going to adapt to address it?
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?
How much of that to think you do? Not much, right?
Even Marines don't want to do what they want to do. So we fly over the beach.
Right. So. So what are the Marines now?
The reason always exists because politically it's impossible to kill them. So don't worry, obviously.
But really what they're for as opposed to what are we doing using the Marines as for the last ten year?
Oh, okay. That's the end of that that little block of stuff that I wanted to talk about.
So let me just take a little pause. Anybody have anything you want to offer about that?
Usually, I guess you learned already about the UK system, but you guys are going through this massive drawdown too, right?
So figuring out what are the mission, essential things you need to have in this much written budget.
If I we're about to have a massive budget cut there, so it's hard to know what to do.
In the US budget. There are only few places to get serious money. Defence.
Social Security. Medicare. Let me give you an example from another profession.
Suppose you had a surgeon who said I wouldn't do the surgery.
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.
Now, about that surgeon, you would want to say they are unethical, would you not?
They're unprofessional. Is part of the obligation of the profession is to be keeping up with the best
available knowledge because you have a social trust relationship with the client.
So when I go to you, I'm assuming that if you are a professional that you will do it right.
Because ultimately the metric of your success is not do you defend your bureaucracy or even your preferred way of doing it,
but are you able to meet the need of the client, which is the basis of the trust relationship between you and the society?
Right. So here's another example.
There's a guy, a surgeon in the United States who published a book called The Checklist Manifesto.
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.
Fine. Just all kinds of stuff by a very, very high rate.
Surgeons are very resistant to using historical history.
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.
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.
Right. So that's to your point. Or are more people, I think not just bureaucracy but culture, right.
The cultures have been formed around certain ways of thinking behaving.
So here's another example. For many years in the Air Force, the culture was that the head pilot was gone.
Right. And then they did a whole series of studies showing if the co-pilot felt empowered to simply raise questions.
But they didn't look right to the pilot. The accident rate would drop dramatically.
So the Air Force had to go through a whole retraining of the pilot culture to say it's a team effort up there.
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.
And you think that's kind of obvious, but it was culturally not acceptable.
Right. So my point is, I mean, and we all struggle with it as individuals only.
I mean, if we've gotten highly developed skills, we can are proud of that accomplishment and love it.
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.
Right. So now that's what you see in the Army is kind of as I mentioned already,
we arguably swung too far the other way in terms of trying to adapt to counterinsurgency.
Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a practical challenge, right?
So the professional argument has to be, what is your evidence that this is the objective future need?
Right. So here's another example used to say that if what you want is close air support in Afghanistan,
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?
So the joint tactical air controller on the ground can send coordinates up to that thing and have that to refuel it,
and it can cruise over the battlespace for days on end.
It would be objectively a better way to deliver air power to do a tour of battlespace right through some of the tactical possible.
What what reason would you have not to do it if you really pressed Air Force people?
And I think their JDAM is beginning to sort of it would answer that is not true.
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.
And so it takes someone to step out of that. So. Right.
Or, you know, you know, the Air Force gives out in first place.
And an Army colonel and Mitchell was convinced that you go to their power to do all kinds of things.
So he violated a whole bunch orders, went out and bombed captured French vessels between the wars and things, and he got caught.
But he said he's the patron saint of the Air Force. You go.
Okay. It takes a mid-grade officer, a major or a lieutenant colonel.
They're given a mission or they have a lot of choices about how they execute this mission.
Right.
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.
And a good example, one of my favourite Army officers is now Brigadier General McMaster.
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.
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.
So he got all of the Arab linguists and specialists he could get from the Air Force Academy to train up his unit,
even give them some Arabic, and then issue general order one, which was every time you offend an Iraqi, we're losing.
And that was one colonel on his own making a decision.
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.
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
the American doctrine and always was overwhelming firepower that would not work at all.
Right. So at every level, I think professionals within their sphere of organisation, I mean you can get the difference.
Here's another example. Just last week, an artillery officer who had been in in Iraq.
He's a colonel. So, you know, I was there with artillery.
I realised I cannot use artillery in advance because it's too indiscriminate.
So he he drove back to the artillery range in Washington, said, I need quick GPS guided artillery munitions.
And within six weeks, you know, he said in the first couple of battles, I only had two, you know.
So I had told the commander I can hit two targets with precision artillery.
So you got to be pretty picky about what you want me to hit with artillery, but I can't use the weapons.
I can't be effective. Now, those are both examples of mid-level adaptation.
You obviously can't run your own procurement system.
You know, as Rumsfeld famously said, you come with the army, you have another weapon, not your you wish.
I think if you look I mean, the Army talks about flexible,
adaptive leaders is what it wants and it talks about soldier resiliency that a massive growth because the ability of people
to be more prepared for and to recover from the kinds of experiences that they're now having is become a major focus.
I mean, the suicide rates in the Army are like three times the number of the general population.
So, you know, the army is well over. All of those mental characteristics are as are more important than physical.
But is that. Okay. Let me move on to another point that I wanted to make.
Another thing one has to do with points to really work on is understand the
relevance of legal frameworks as to say one doesn't start with a blank slate here.
One has to start with with things that every officer, that every soldier needs to know.
Something in the U.S. kitchen. This is one of my personal obsessions.
You've probably noticed that every military member, and for that matter, every federal employee like me and takes an oath.
And the oath is in the Constitution of the United States, not to any particular leader.
So it's rather important that they understand what the Constitution says, and frankly, they usually don't.
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?
There are some pictures on the wall. Yeah.
You see the president, vice president, the secretary of defence, the service secretary, all the way down to the local commander.
Constitutionally speaking, there's something seriously wrong with this picture.
Maybe the only Americans in the room know what should be at the top.
The President, the Congress and the Supreme Court, all three is a very important point,
because the Constitution says some things that are easily misunderstood, especially given my reports.
It says the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, the United States.
True enough. And the reason that it said that was the founders were worried about unity.
But if you read Article one of the Constitution, which is not about the president, it's about the Congress.
It says it empowers the Congress to create Army at all.
And if you do it, you can only have it for two years. So the expectation was there would be no standing army.
So I like to say that to students, you know, in terms of the founders,
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.
But normally they work for the government. Period. That's it.
Now that's. Important because it goes to the very deep question of civil military relations.
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.
If I Commander-In-Chief stand on my head in a corner, I'd do it.
And all thoughtful officer said. Where did somebody get to be an army lieutenant colonel with such a serious misunderstanding of the Constitution?
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.
So the starting point for at least in the American context,
and I'll leave you to figure out what the equivalents are in your various national structure.
But for us, getting a clear understanding, just that point is vitally important.
Why? It's vitally important because if I get an order, for example, to torture a prisoner,
even if it comes from the president of the United States, the right answer is that's a violation of a ratified treaty.
And according to the Constitution of the United States, a ratified treaty is U.S. law, and that is an illegal war.
Only so far. So they need to know that if any American system there's a code of military justice,
the Uniform Code of military justice, the whole legal system, they need to know that.
They need to know international law and treaties. In recent years, it's become fashionable in America to pooh pooh the international system.
I like to ignore them a lot by saying whose bright idea was the U.N. part bright idea?
But also to point out this clause of the Constitution says said ratify treaties are law or U.S. law.
So you don't have an option when you start doing something else, you will have to understand to work with as well,
because I understand the interconnections of some parts of the profession.
So for example, in the U.S. military, one of our great strengths is the quality of our non-commissioned officer for the service.
If you don't understand the role of the sergeant plays reasonably the young lieutenant,
platoon commander, for example, who's way younger and less experienced with the sergeant.
That's a very complicated relationship from the young offenders to officers of the new generation.
Okay. Let me go on to my general point about the limits of the philosophical approach.
As David mentioned, in college, I didn't major in philosophy, but I was also frustrated with philosophy in one way.
One thing that frustrated me about it was its general data source tendency to
approach the world as if ideas operated in some kind of historical vacuum.
That's important when you're dealing with the military, because obviously they're playing out in a real world, historical and evolving environment.
So let's just start with the basic question. The Peace of Westphalia that sets up the international system.
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,
and for particular reasons it solved some problems and it created some of it.
So remind yourself what it was before Westphalia in Europe, at least notionally.
What was the idea?
The idea was Christendom, a unified Christian civilisation with the Pope, as the supreme authority in the system after the Reformation.
That's no longer possible. And what follows is a series of wars, like all wars, there are many sources of it.
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,
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.
And it became apparent as those wars dragged on that Europe was not going to be put back to religious unity.
Lutherans were unhappy with the Lutheran Christendom, the colonies, with the Calvinists, with the Catholics, with Catholics.
But it wasn't going to happen. So Peace of Westphalia was not a triumph with anybody's ideals.
It was a settlement of the exhaustion.
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.
And the compromise is going to be a system of sovereign states, and those sovereign states will have to issue proper territorial integrity.
You're supposed to share the borders and political sovereignty, which means within the borders they can do whatever they want.
And nobody, no other state has liberty to criticise them. Now, given the religious issues nobody has talked about,
what are the practical implications of settling for the Westphalian state with respect to the religious convictions of individual?
But the problem out there was only worth Germany over Fallujah as a capital.
Right. But are you surprised because regulators really, really view for each of their religion.
But so of what? So the practical application of your Catholic and Protestant country or vice versa,
that your government can't treat whoever they want up to and including Hillary
and all the states swallowed that because they said it's the best of a bad deal.
Right. So that's the word, so to speak, totally anachronistically.
It was the hope for political stability bought at the price of human rights.
Of course, the concept of human rights hasn't been invented yet, but in effect, that's what it was saying.
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.
At the time, arguably, it was a pretty reasonable compromise. The alternatives are all worse.
They could go on fighting over forever or we could accept this deal.
Now, the fact that human rights were sold out over everybody was family.
It was fairly obvious to everybody. Right.
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,
a long preface to the king of France, because he's trying to persuade the King of France to stop persecuting Huguenots.
This is what we believe to see we're really okay. That did work out so well.
But that was what Calvin was wrong. So this failed.
This weakness of Westphalia with respect to human rights that has been palpable to everybody for a long time.
But he got it, obviously very clearly articulated after the Holocaust with the slogan Never Again
and with a brand new U.N. that's one of whose first acts was the 1949 genocide,
which said, in broad terms, if genocide is going on, the states of the world agree that they will do something.
The result of that for a long time is we don't want to use the G word.
When Rwanda was occurring, the woman who was the State Department spokesperson later was in my seminar at Carlisle,
and she explained in some detail that every morning before she went out to the press, she was coached very carefully.
First of all, not use a G word to describe what was happening. You have to the level of body language and so forth.
The policy of the United States is this is not just because the belief is that if we called it genocide,
this kicked in some obligation to go do something about it.
And and President Clinton was determined we were not going because he'd just been so badly burned earlier.
Of course, now we've passed that threshold. President Bush called Darfur a genocide on Congo.
And so now we're in the world where we can use that word. All we want is no longer effective.
Right. And this all culminated a few years ago, as you know, when with the new responsibility to protect go, which goes even further.
And the difference between says. So I was listening to a podcast one day across the pond and listening to a very
articulate liberal guy saying This clearly triggers our competing in Libya.
We absolutely have an obligation to go. And his interlocutor, Ted Koppel, the ambassador, John, said, well, not so fast.
Think about the law of unintended consequences. Where are you going to send how I'm going to be there.
What are you to do to get there? Thought on through.
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.
But the best argues that look where we stand right now is we've got two bodies of international law,
was Dalian Law, which talks about state sovereignty. And we have huge international humanitarian law, which suggests interventionism.
They're both completely legally valid and they are totally powerful.
And that's exactly where we are, exactly what they are.
So it's interesting when you watch the behaviour of states and you and you listen
individuals that depending on the issue they might one side or the other of the law.
So you know, if you don't like what's going on in somebody else's country,
you really like the international humanitarian law, if you will, like what's going on in your country.
You really want to state sovereignty, sovereignty. And you get and you can play the one because they're both valid.
So play the part which you are. And there is no harder solution to that because a notionally the Security Council was here.
The council, as we all know, is very rarely going to do much of anything.
So soldiers are put in the middle of all of that, right.
I just saw a letter. The main point of it and this is where I think philosophy really does fall short.
I mean, put this strongly, none of this what I just said is fully rational or even intellectually reconcilable.
It's a mess. It means, therefore,
that any attempt to insist on imposing clarity on the system will ironically end
up with irrelevance because the world is not going to conform to that part.
So if you're going to help actual practitioners understand the system,
you need to help them understand the mess and not the clutter, because that's the real world in which they will be offering.
They need to kind of make their peace with this unclarity.
There's always going to be if we find a better political solution, there is a tension between, I think,
our best moral impulses, which are always kind of coherent or broadly universalist and cosmopolitan,
stressing the equal value and dignity of every human person and the importance of
the rights and the reality that the world is still organised in sovereign states.
And rarely are states going to agree. Intervening against a sovereign state.
Occasionally individual states will do it. I was using the example of David working on self-publishing.
Maybe remember Vietnam and Cambodia unilaterally for a whole bunch of reasons.
And I think most people thought after deep rows of the international players normally crossing and other countries were in that war.
But given what was going on in Cambodia, I think most people probably think that way, though that makes no sense.
Legally, hard to justify, doesn't create a case precedent for anything.
If if, if, in fact, anyone is going to intervene in Libya, I leave the large that the Security Council will not authorise it.
So if anything happens, there is probably going to be. No. But let me just start with that.
The irreconcilable ness argument. What do you think?
Well, thank you very much, Matt. And we have about 25 minutes.