Introduction to the Symposium on Military Ethics

As symposium editor, I am pleased to introduce this special issue of Public Integrity on military ethics. With the disdain for the military establishment during the Vietnam War era long past and its having been replaced by the amazing level of public support and trust enjoyed by the contemporary armed services in the United States, military ethics takes on special significance. To ensure the continuance of this elevated level of support and trust, building and maintaining an ethical climate throughout the U.S. armed forces, from an organizational as well as an individual perspective, is crucial.

A key element of building and maintaining an ethics-focused organizational climate is ethical leadership, and the symposium begins with a discussion of ethics training for military leaders and the importance of going beyond the conventional training approach.

An understanding of the multifaceted concept of the “just war” is also important for establishing the legitimacy of labeling any of the extreme, but not infrequent, activities in the conduct of modern warfare as “ethical.” As such, an article on the changing nature of just war is fitting for the symposium.

Any discussion of military ethics would be incomplete without an examination of the recurring problem of ensuring ethics in military procurement, so it is appropriate to examine ethical issues in the procurement process from the U.S. perspective, as further explicated by the introduction of a cross-cultural comparison drawn from the matériel procurement policies in South Africa’s National Defence Force.

Organizationally focused military issues are important, to be sure, to build an ethical climate, but without appropriate ethical focus on the behavior and treatment of military members past and present, building and maintaining an ethical climate would be quite difficult if not unachievable. As such, a discussion of military ethical issues would be incomplete if it didn’t include consideration of some of the more frequently publicized problems experienced by an alarming number of U.S. military personnel. Therefore, two representative articles are included, the first associated with the military response to those personnel reported to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and the second focusing on military sexual trauma issues.

With the limited space of a single issue, it is not possible to focus on the myriad ethical problems potentially facing the military. Although missing from the submissions for this issue, it seems there is tremendous opportunity and need for additional research focused on ethical-behavior questions internal to military organizations both in peace and in war, and most recently the impact on the military services and its members from various perspectives as a result of the so-called social engineering questions. Opening all military positions to women and allowing the LGBTQ community to serve openly, including providing counseling and surgical services to such members, are profound changes that seek to ensure inclusiveness for all willing to serve, but it might well be of particular importance to follow these changes in light of the changing political environment emanating from the most recent presidential election.