A US Army platoon leader has a fascinating article in Army Magazine: former US Army Captain Kevin Bell wrote How Our Training Fails Us When it Counts, recounting a story from 2008 in which he led a platoon in Afghanistan.  He uses his personal experiences to describe how the US Army woefully fails in its efforts to prepare its soldiers for ethical challenges in combat.

No infantryman who sits through the required PowerPoint classes on the Geneva Conventions and treatment of enemy prisoners of war (EPW) leaves the classroom with a new perspective on the ethics of war…As it stands, though, classroom and field training on detainee operations do almost nothing to help soldiers untangle the twisted moral landscape of anger, intelligence gathering and justice in wartime.

Without directly addressing it, he highlights the weakness of the situation-based ethics currently taught in much of the military academia: 

It makes the unrealistic assumption, however, that rules by themselves are enough to shape behavior in the worst scenarios.

For Bell’s part, standing feet from a man he believes responsible for the death of his soldier, the platoon leader says

The bold words that I had long ago spoken to my soldiers about the importance of morality in combat were forgotten…

Nothing in my religious, secular or military education had prepared me for what I faced.

Bell makes a reference to a company commander ending his career by “stepping outside the law” to get the information he needed to find an insurgent.  The story is reminiscent of US Army LtCol Allen West — now a Republican Congressman from Florida.  LtCol West performed a mock execution — making an Iraqi insurgent think he was about to be executed in order to extract information.  After initially facing charges, LtCol West was allowed to retire.

Bell notes that current Army training faces challenges in creating realistic ethical conundrums in training:  the bullets aren’t real (on either side), and there is little emotional investment in the engagement.

The role of ethics in training and Army institutions has to change significantly if we want soldiers to remember the importance of morality in combat…

Perhaps inadvertently, the author notes the importance of a need for “unbreakable” morality:

Soldiers intuitively understand that doctrine needs to be adjusted to fit mission needs, but the same cannot be said of legal and moral prohibitions. To have meaning, these should be essentially unbreakable.

Such statements, of course, run counter to the modern interpretation of situation-based ethics — there is no absolute morality, and “right” or “wrong” is perpetually based on the immediate events.  The move away from absolute morality, of course, was predicated on an effort to separate such training from religion, from which the concept of absolute morality arises.

On that topic, Bell notes there is a tension in the Army’s use of the chaplaincy, as well as a basic limitation to what chaplains can accomplish under current procedures:

Too often the institutional answer to the problem of integrating ethics into unit life has been to leave it all to the chaplains. There is an important role for chaplains to play in these discussions, and units in combat need good chaplains just as much as they need bullets. With that said, there is a mismatch between the huge role that the Army envisions for chaplains, and what they are actually able to do in many units.

There are, and will continue to be, ethical challenges facing soldiers in war.  How the military chooses to help soldiers address those difficulties is a challenge it has yet to overcome itself.

Via the Mad Padre.