True Faith And Allegiance: The Burden of Military Ethics

4. Military Education: Analyzing Fidelity to Purpose

4. Military Education Analyzing Fidelity to Purpose I never expect a soldier to think. —George Bernard Shaw, The Devil's Disciple (1897) A professional military force exists principally to fight its country 's wars and, if need be, to kill its country's enemies. Military training must therefore be faithful to this fundamental purpose. Training that is brutal and dehumanizing instills neither necessary skills nor correct values; training that lacks appropriate challenge and rigor produces soldiers who cannot perform their jobs. The tension associated with training is that soldiers must be taught both to obey legal orders without hesitation and to disobey illegal orders. In order to achieve that split purpose, soldiers must be both trained in skills and educated in values. Their true faith and allegiance must be more than loyalty to leaders or comrades alone, more than loyalty to mission or task accomplishment alone. Their true faith and allegiance must be loyalty to the idea of virtue itself. Without that concept there is the danger that they will follow orders without any anxiety about the justice of those orders. Such anxiety, I will argue here, is desirable. Obedience and Disobedience Few, if any, students of the military would argue that obedience is not absolutely necessary to the conduct of battlefield operations or to the accomplishment even of peacetime responsibilities . As Field Marshal William Slim pointed out, "The more modern war becomes, the more essential appear the basic qualities that from the beginning of history have distinguished arm- Military Education 57 ies from mobs. The first of these is discipline."1 Discipline, in this sense, amounts to strict control or orderly conduct. The historian Barbara Tuchman once explained to the Army War College why the three-word motto for the United States Military Academy, "Duty, Honor, Country," no longer adequately defines discipline: "Country is clear enough, but what is Duty in a wrong war? What is Honor when fighting is reduced to 'wasting' the living space—not to mention the lives— of a people that never did us any harm? The simple West Point answer is that Duty and Honor consist in carrying out the orders of the government. That is what the Nazis said in their defense, and we tried them for war crimes nevertheless."2 Air Force Academy instructor Malham Wakin and his colleagues suggest that "because orders in the military must direct people to perform naturally distasteful acts—such as working under outrageously adverse conditions or risking their lives— obedient response ratifies the military structure."3 They make this critically important point about obedience to the "wrong" order: When military officers are inclined to disobey because an order is wrong, knowledge of the facts and the probable consequences of disobedience is vital. Stupidity and incompetence , though they constitute in the military—particularly the military at war—the ultimate immorality, may be compounded when an order is disobeyed. Disobedience seldom eliminates the source of stupidity; in fact, it delivers to the incompetent commander a weapon for a righteous charge against the disobedient. A subordinate must further recognize that the wrong order may be as justified as any other order, and that it usually comes from a source with superior access to certain information.4 In other words, those who carry out orders may very well not have the perspective that their commanders have. (It is, however , entirely possible that commanders may not have the perspective of the troops—but it is the troops whose loyalty will be questioned in the face of their recalcitrance.) As Air Force Academy philosopher Kenneth Wenker puts it, "Obedience becomes 58 TRUE FAITH AND ALLEGIANCE the condition which allows us to attain the moral goals of the armed forces." Wenker calls obedience "a functional imperative ."5 The presumption must be, then, that orders are legal and, consequently, binding upon those who receive them. In 1991 a doctor in the Army Reserve, Capt. Yolanda HuetVaughn , was charged with desertion for refusing orders to deploy to the Gulf during operation Desert Storm. A commissioned officer, Huet-Vaughn contended that the war was illegal and immoral, and she refused to accept her assignment. A military judge, during her desertion trial, said the issue was simply whether she refused deployment in order to avoid hazardous duty. She was dismissed from the Army and sentenced to two and a half years in prison.6 Was she a conscientious person, worthy of respect, or an officer...