Military ethicists debate their role

By: MARK WALKER - Staff Writer
Symposium hears call for appointment of moralists at highest levels of government | Friday, January 25, 2008 10:17 PM PST ∞

SAN DIEGO ---- Military ethicists were AWOL in the run up to the Iraq war, according to a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and professor who advocates their presence on policy-making groups such as the president's National Security Council.

Charles Myers, professor emeritus at the U.S. Air Force Academy, contended during a keynote address to a gathering of military ethicists that they share some responsibility for the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq.

"Ethicists were not as helpful as we could have been," Myers said Thursday, the opening day of a two-day gathering of the International Society on Military Ethics. "We were too accepting of the administration's arguments that have since been proven false."

Comprised largely of military academy and university professors, the group met at University of San Diego for its first-ever West Coast symposium.

Too often, Myers said, military ethicists talk to one another rather than policy makers and top-level military commanders.

"We were derelict because we did not seek an official role to provide moral counsel to war planners."

While much of the symposium was dedicated to a theme of whether soldiers should be able to selectively seek conscientious objector status if they believe a particular conflict is unjust, the ethicists also spent a lot of time talking about Iraq.

Myers called on the ethicists to be more critical of civilian leaders' rationale for going to war, faulting them along with journalists and politicians for being too accepting of Bush administration arguments.

The case for invading Iraq was built largely on the contention that Saddam Hussein had large quantities of weapons of mass destruction and was hosting and aiding al-Qaida fighters, neither of which turned out to be true.

The momentum for war might have been slowed if a military ethicist was involved in the top-level discussions, Myers contended.

"Moral counsel is needed in war fighting in an official, acknowledged role," he said, adding that an ethicist should be appointed to the National Security Council. "We must campaign for and get positions of true responsibility."

He also called on uniformed specialists in military ethics to serve in war zones and be part of combat command staffs.

Military attorneys known as judge advocates general now serving on command staffs are too focused on what the law is rather than what the law and best moral choice might be, he asserted.

"We should be part of the fight," Myers said. "Until we get out of the classroom and into the trenches, we can't expect to have much of an impact."

Problems with contractors
On another front, a retired army colonel said the military's stature in Iraq and around the world, as well as its professionalism, is threatened by the heavy reliance on private contractors.

"We've gone too far," said Bill Latham, who now teaches at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. "Our increasing reliance on contractors is turning into a dependence."

The U.S. has more than 150,000 contractors on its payroll in Iraq, including many Iraqis performing noncombat jobs. But the use of an estimated 13,000 private security contractors such as Blackwater Worldwide is creating a host of problems, Latham said during a panel discussion on the topic.

The issues include granting firms such as Blackwater immunity from prosecution under U.S. or Iraqi law, the firms' recruitment of highly-trained military specialists and lack of enough qualified contract managers to prevent fraud and abuse, Latham suggested.

"We can't go cold turkey, but we should take a hard look at where we rely on contractors," said Latham, who is an instructor in the Army college's logistics and resource operations department.

The shooting of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad last year by Blackwater employees is one example of how the actions of a private group can have long-term strategic implications for the military, he said.

"When we can't control our own contractors and the public sees cases of waste, fraud and abuse, I believe we lose legitimacy," he said.

Competing for personnel
The U.S. is now negotiating with the Iraqi government on continuing to provide contractors with legal protections from prosecution. At issue is how broad those protections should be.

At the same time, it remains unclear whether crimes committed by contractors, including the Blackwater civilian killings in September, will be subject to American law when the current exemption expires later this year.

Some of the soldiers prosecuted in the 2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner torture case were taking their orders directly from contractors, Latham said.

Reductions in the overall size of the military that started in the Clinton administration and the outsourcing of work advocated by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are now combining to deplete the services of highly-trained specialists, he argued.

Blackwater Worldwide, for example, looks for people with extensive military experience. Those with special operations training are particularly prized and are lured to the private sector by salaries much higher than those paid by the services.

"It forces us to have to offer higher re-enlistment bonuses because we're competing with private security teams," Latham said. "We're underwriting our competition for a limited pool of expertise."

The Government Accountability Office reported Friday that the Defense Department spent fully one-third of its entire budget in fiscal year 2006 on subcontracts from private firms.

Latham said that as the number of private contractors has swelled, accountability has diminished.

"We have fewer contract managers today than we did in the '90s and they're being asked to manage thousands of more contracts."

The papers
The Society on Military Ethics, formerly known as the Joint Services Conference on Professional Ethics, incorporated as a nonprofit entity in 2005 and is a forum for exchanging ideas about and analyzing professional military ethics.

Many of the position papers produced for this year's symposium will soon be posted on the group's Web site at www.usafa.edu/isme. Position papers from previous symposiums also are available on the site.

Members caution that their writings do not always reflect personal beliefs, but rather are written as a scholarly exercise to foment discussion on a particular topic.

Contact staff writer Mark Walker at (760) 740-3529 or mlwalker@nctimes.com.

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