The Dougout

Or, From the Horse's Mouth. A former Naval JAG officer explains how the military academies have become part of the problem, infected with the disease that is the slave morality and Just War Theory:

Michael Walzer is wrong. That's not an easy sentence for me to type. I'm a Naval Academy graduate and a former JAG. Most of what I know about the law of war was taught to me straight from the text of Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars. You can’t study ethical warfighting without concluding that Michael Walzer knows his stuff.

This is the same Michael Walzer who believes General Omar Bradley a war criminal for planning and ordering Operation COBRA. COBRA facilitated the Allied break-out from the Normandy beach-head that led directly to the final defeat of Nazi-Germany. However, what Naval Academy graduates know about "ethical warfighting" comes from Walzer's altruistic mush.

The article's author is Tara Lee who is a "former Resident Fellow at the Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics at the United States Naval Academy." She goes on to state that Walzer, and other academics, need new "rubrics" for a war against non-state organizations. What she doesn't get is that Walzer's thesis is as poisonous to any free country fighting a ruthless enemy regardless of that enemy's political status.

The reason for this is simple, Just War Theory is based on an ethical system devised by and for illiterate goat-herders which was then adulterated with Plato's ethics of self-sacrifice and epistemology of unreason. The combination is found in Augustine, the originator of Just War doctrine. With the single exception of a Platonic Christianity, Walzer explicitly rejects the West's Greco-Roman military heritage by his turning Thucydides into a strawman.

The meta-ethics are false and therefore, everything derived from it is suspect. If Walzer's views were adopted by the United States in 1941 we would today be speaking German, Japanese, or Russian.

Update: Ahistoricality,

I don't have a copy of Just and Unjust Wars handy, so I'll do my best from memory. Walzer faults Bradley for not using "due diligence" in preventing civilian deaths. Apparently, Bradley was suppose to warn the Germans of the impending attack. Here is a quote from Walzer that I wrote down on this:

"We still want to know what positive measures might have been taken to avoid “the slaughter of the innocents” or reduce the damage done. It is important to insist on such measures because, as this example clearly shows, the proportionality rule often has no inhibitory effects at all." (pg. 318, of the paperback edition)

Don't you love the use of the royal "we?" In other words, military commanders who did their best to minimize civilian casualties without placing the mission or American troops at risk are still guilty, for that very reason. Another quote:

"But even if their target is very important, and the number of innocent people threatened relatively small, they [military commanders] must risk soldiers before they kill civilians … I have been arguing here that even enemy civilians, over whom sovereignty is not claimed, are the responsibility of attacking armies…." (p. 157, 175)

While Walzer, pro-forma, acknowledges that civilians will be killed in war, military leaders (and by extension political ones) must sacrifice both their own soldiers and the mission to do everything imaginable in preventing civilian casualties. He also explicitly states that when applying Just War doctrine it doesn't matter who the aggressor was, the cause being fought over, or the results incurred if the defenders of liberty lose.

Hat tip: Mark Grimsley