Moral Advantage, Strategic Advantage?

Abstract

This article argues that Man is a moral being and strategy inherently is a human project. It follows that strategy has to have a moral dimension. All human beings have a moral compass, acquired by social–cultural necessity. The compass has survival value. The problem is that the human race does not possess only one such compass. Since will is key to strategic performance, and because that will requires as fuel a sufficient confidence in the justice of a cause, in principle at least one belligerent's moral armament may be usefully superior to another's. One can claim with confidence that strategic advantage can be secured by some moral advantage.

Key Words:

• Ethics
• Strategy
• Moral Authority

Notes

¹Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape 1995), 313.

²William Ewart Gladstone, quoted in Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (London: Hurst Publishers 2008), 47.

³A superior period-piece collection of relevant essays is Russell Hardin, et al. (eds.), Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press 1985).

⁴On the invention, perhaps the discovery, of the rather idealised Atlantic community of the ‘West’, see Robert J. McMahon, Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order (Washington, DC: Potomac Books 2009), 83–4.

⁵Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to ‘The Peloponnesian War’ (New York: The Free Press 1996), 43.

⁶David J. Lonsdale, Alexander: Killer of Men. Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Art of War (London: Constable 2004), 3–4.

⁷This claim is explained in Colin S. Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford: Oxford UP forthcoming 2010).

⁸Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1976), 75.

⁹David Kennedy, Of War and Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2006), 80 (emphasis in original).

¹⁰Ibid., 116.

¹¹Ibid., 132.

¹²Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books 2000), 44–7.

¹³I prefer Antulio J. Echevarria II's translation of wunderliche as ‘wondrous’ to the Howard and Paret choices of ‘remarkable’ (1st ed.) and ‘paradoxical’ (rev. ed.). Antulio J. Echevarria II, Clausewitz and Contemporary War (Oxford: Oxford UP 2007), 81, n. 40; von Clausewitz, On War, 89.

¹⁴F.A. Hayek, quoted in John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London: Hutchinson 1993), 6.

¹⁵See Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press 2003).

¹⁶J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Torchbooks 1967), 152.

¹⁷Ibid., 231.

¹⁸Ralph Peters, Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books 1999), 18.

¹⁹Ibid., 171.

²⁰See Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1984); Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2006); and especially Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 2008).

²¹Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1968).

²²Richard Overy, ‘Evil Things, Excellent Things: The Moral Contest’, in Why the Allies Won, ch. 9.

²³von Clausewitz, On War, 75.

²⁴I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of this article for obliging me to recognise that morality may be regarded as being both objective in a vital sense, yet applied in practice in a manner filtered by a community's chosen values as well as by the perceived needs of the situation. This formula is suspiciously ecumenical, but nonetheless has a powerful appeal, at least it does to this strategic theorist.

²⁵Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience, 3.

²⁶Ibid.

²⁷Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York: Macmillan 1973), 452.

²⁸Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP 2001), xii.

²⁹See Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2009).

³⁰An outstanding exploration of this confusing and confused concept is Christopher Coker, Humane Warfare (London: Routledge 2001). Also see his study, Ethics and War in the 21st Century (Abingdon: Routledge 2008).

³¹See Michael Howard (ed.), Restraints on War: Studies in the Limitation of Armed Conflict (Oxford: Oxford UP 1979); Michael Howard, George J. Andropolous and Mark R. Shulman (eds.), The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1994); Leslie C. Green, The Contemporary Law of Armed Conflict, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester UP 2000); Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff (eds.), Documents on the Laws of War, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP 2000); Michael Byers, War Law: Understanding International Law and Armed Conflict (New York: Grove Press 2005); Kennedy, Of War and Law; and Christine Gray, International Law and the Use of Force, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP 2008).

³²See Gray, Strategy Bridge.

³³Stephen Peter Rosen, War and Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2005), is a valuable exploratory study.

³⁴Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt, rev. John Marincola (London: Penguin 2003), 340, Book 5, para. 78.

³⁵See Miriam Fendius Elman (ed.), Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1997); and Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York: W.W. Norton 1997), amidst a well-stocked field.

³⁶See Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel (eds), Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1992).

³⁷von Clausewitz, On War, 605.

³⁸Richard P. Henrick, Crimson Tide (New York: Avon Books 1995), 97. The novel is based on the screenplay.

³⁹Ibid., 75.

⁴⁰I develop this argument in Colin S. Gray, ‘The Merit in Ethical Realism’, in National Security Dilemmas: Challenge and Opportunities (Washington, DC: Potomac Books 2009), ch. 8.

⁴¹See Paul W. Schroeder, ‘Napoleon's Foreign Policy: A Criminal Enterprise’, Journal of Military History 54 (April 1990), 147–61.

⁴²John Boyd, ‘A Discourse on Winning and Losing’, Briefing (Aug. 1987), 121. See also Frans P.B. Osinga: Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Abingdon: Routledge 2007), 169–73; Frans P.B. Osinga, ‘On Boyd, bin Laden, and Fourth Generation Warfare as String Theory’, in John Andreas Olsen (ed.), On New Wars (Oslo: Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies 2007), 175–7.

⁴³The appearance of Don Carrick, James Connelly and Paul Robinson (eds.), Ethics Education for Irregular Warfare (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing 2009), reflects contemporary recognition of this enduring truth.

⁴⁴See Josephus, The Jewish War, trans. G.A. Williamson, rev. ed. (London: Penguin 1981); and Lester W. Grau, The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan (London: Frank Cass 1996).

⁴⁵This explanation is strongly favoured in the best study to date of the Army of Northern Virginia. See Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press 2008).

⁴⁶See the outstanding discussion in Overy, Why the Allies Won, ch. 9.

⁴⁷To illustrate, see Michael C.C. Adams, Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1978).

⁴⁸Echevarria, Clausewitz and Contemporary War, 118.

⁴⁹Kennedy, Of War and Law, 108.