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14 A Force for (Relative) Good An Augustinian Perspective In recent years, the military forces of the United Kingdom have adopted the phrase A Force for Good as a motto. Similarly, the U.S. Navy has adopted the slogan, America’s Navy: A Global Force for Good. One suspects that there are many reasons for this. All militaries need to make efforts to manage the public’s perception of them. Marketing one’s military force as a “force for good” promises to be a potent means of garnering support for the military, for military procurement and budgets, and (perhaps) for recruiting individuals to serve in the force. In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the nadir of that perception at the depths of the Vietnam era and the heights when, in recent years, the American public has consistently rated its military as the most trusted institution in our society. At present, despite the obvious horrible strains on our forces and a number of humiliating cases of gross misconduct by individual soldiers and units, the support for our forces is still high—at least as manifested in “support the troops” magnets attached to the rear of nearly every SUV in Colorado Springs. Today, however, I don’t wish to reflect on the complex topic of public perception of the military or the conditions for its continuing support of military activities. Rather, I propose to take up the assertion that militaries are “forces for good.” At first blush the claim that forces whose core competency is necessarily “killing people and breaking things” (as the U.S. military often likes to put it) is such a force for good must strike one as implausible. The idea that, properly used, military force is a “force for good” is one with a long history of philosophical depth and sophistication and, I will argue, one that we must consciously and explicitly keep in mind if we are to be able to use a phrase such as this to characterize what modern military forces can and should be about. Indeed, I will argue that if we fail to keep in mind that historical contribution, the very phrase “force for 173 174 Issues in Military Ethics good” runs the risk of encouraging self-delusion and moral blindness. So if it is a phrase we may use with intellectual integrity, it requires some careful exploration and qualification, and in what follows, I hope at least to start us down the path to such qualification. My perspective on these questions is (inevitably) a U.S. perspective. And I’m very aware that different national cultures view the nature and purposes of their military services in fundamentally different ways. Let’s start with the nature and purposes of military forces themselves. In the United States, there has been much discussion of this issue in recent years, especially in the Army. When I first went to work for the U.S. Army War College in 1998, a bedrock assumption about this was in place and almost entirely unquestioned. On many occasions, I heard then chief of staff of the Army Eric Shinseki describe the U.S. Army’s purpose as “fighting and winning America’s wars”—usually adding that this self-understanding of the Army was (in his phrase) “the Army’s nonnegotiable” contract with the American people. I realize, of course, that the United States is, if not uniquely, at least more than most, focused on the war-fighting mission and that other militaries tend to think more in terms of national development, international peacekeeping and stabilization, humanitarian operations, or other noncombat missions. Nevertheless, since use of lethal coercive power is, in the end, the core competence of military forces in general, I submit that this provides a useful point of departure for our reflections. This particular way of thinking about the Army had a powerful and important history for American senior officers of General Shinseki’s generation . It reflects a very understandable pride in the accomplishment of that generation in transforming the “broken Army” that emerged from Vietnam into the powerful combined arms force that demonstrated its amazing capabilities in the first Gulf War. James Kitfield’s excellent book Prodigal Soldiers chronicles this transformation in detail.1 A central element of the transformation was the creation of the national training centers in which Army units could experience “in the box” (as they referred to their time at the training centers) the most realistic training imaginable. As one British filmmaker remarked to...

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