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:  Read more