Managing Military Organizations by Soeters Joseph;C.van Fenema Paul;Beeres Robert;

Author:Soeters, Joseph;C.van Fenema, Paul;Beeres, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Economics, Finance, Business & Industry
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2010-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Moral professionalism and the military

A great deal has been written in the last few decades on the professionalization of armed forces, and some, for example those of Israel and Australia (Robinson 2008:7), have included professionalism in their value lists. However, not surprisingly, one key element—that a professional is more loyal to his profession than to his organization and colleagues—is less developed in the military. Nevertheless, most authors today seem to agree with the view that the military profession is, indeed, a profession.

However, if being moral, and thus also moral professionalism, involves the ability to put oneself in other people’s places, this presents a potential difficulty for the military. Most manifestations of military ethics and other professional ethics, respectively, are fairly consistent as to whose interests are most important, though it seems that they point in different directions. Whereas, for instance, the values of the medical profession and medical ethics are about patients and medical care, and not about how to associate with colleagues, the gist of the codes, oaths and values as currently formulated in most militaries is undeniably somewhat one-sided in that they mainly pay attention to military effectiveness, and the needs of the organization and colleagues. This ethic took shape, however, in a time in which contact with the local population played a lesser role.

The predicament facing most militaries today is clear, however. Armed forces are institutions that flourish on the loyalty among colleagues and to the organization, something that is often called ‘thick morality’ (Walzer 1994) and is somewhat at odds with what a ‘regular’ professional ethic entails. Those who deploy troops, on the other hand, are politicians who increasingly further a universalistic, ‘thin’ form of morality that stresses justice and human rights, ironically enough often regarding conflicts that are a result of people allowing themselves to be led by a thick morality. So, where the military works with rather narrow circles of loyalty because that is what military effectiveness on most accounts demands, politicians tend to take the widest possible circle as their starting point.

Where lies the loyalty, however, when thin and thick conflict? It has been noted by several authors, though probably foremost by sociologist Martin Shaw in The New Western Way of War (2005), that, when it comes to losses, civilian casualties among the local population are deemed less important than Western military losses. It is perceived that way by both the militaries and the populations at large in the West, hence the emphasis not only on maximum force protection, but also on ways of delivering firepower that are relatively safe for Western military personnel, yet sometimes less so for the local population. This risk-transfer will generally remain within the limits of the ‘double effect’ clause of the just war tradition in that civilian casualties are an unintended side-effect of legitimate attacks on military targets. It possibly falls short, however, in the light of Michael Walzer’s restatement of that clause in his Just and Unjust Wars, holding that the actor has to make efforts so as to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible, ‘accepting costs to himself’ (1992:155).

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