The excellent hardware, software, and procedures available today provide options in the targeting process that were not available previously. Yet, the improvements have not altered the fact that, ultimately, United States military members are charged with the responsibility of advising and deciding rightly concerning the risk of collateral casualties and damage. Thus far, this paper has discussed multiple considerations that military decision makers and their staffs should consider in targeting: moral principles, legal standards, national humanitarian values, political objectives, the rules of engagement, and the professional military ethic. They also have legal advisors and a well-defined targeting process with built-in assessments of collateral effects to assist them. However, the “decision environment” in which these public servants find themselves is a very complex one with regard to the guidance and considerations they must weigh. It is also an environment filled with physical, mental, and emotional stress, in addition to what the military calls the “fog of war”—the uncertainty that results from the lack of adequate, correct information. To more fully understand the challenges faced by these military members, one must also explore the tensions and conflicts inherent in their considerations and the biases that may be present within the decision process.

Moral Tensions and Conflicts within the Targeting Process

Identifying moral tensions between the considerations in determining proportionality is the first step to further improving an understanding of the military member’s decision environment. This discussion begins with a brief exploration of the inherent tensions between the moral and legal principles overviewed in Part Three. These tensions will then be used to frame potential conflicts between considerations for military members in making targeting decisions.

The principle of proportionality discussed in Part Three identified a primary tension between the obligation to achieve the political aims of the war and the obligation to protect the innocent in the course of fighting the war. This tension rises to the forefront of moral considerations in the targeting process. While it is true that the obligation of protecting the innocent functions as a constraint on the objective of achieving the political aims, it is such a strong constraint that it justifies nearly equal consideration. The resulting inherent tension becomes a full-blown conflict in the troublesome case of double effect when complete discrimination between the military target and civilians is not possible and harm to innocents is likely in the course of an attack. Neither the tension of proportionality nor the conflict of double effect is easily resolved or even greatly simplified by applying the concepts of Just War or the standards of the international law of war. However, these concepts and standards do describe the pieces that contribute to the tension and conflict and the basic relationships between those pieces.

For example, while the discussion of Just War explored the moral principle of humanity, it was the overview of international law that named its antagonist: military necessity. In determinations of proportionality, it is the principle of humanity that gives value to the innocent civilians whose lives must be weighed against the importance of the military target that is given value by its military necessity. This relationship is illustrated in Figure 1 by a balance in which the basic rule of discrimination supports the beam of proportionality. Attached to this beam are the principles of humanity and military necessity, in turn supporting their respective “objectives” of innocent civilians and the military target. Protecting the innocent civilians is the shield of the principle of minimal harm taken from Walzer’s ideas. Limiting the attack on the military target is the principle of minimal force. The analogy depicted in this illustration breaks down if one erroneously infers that anything done to achieve the desired effects on one side will automatically work against the objective on the other. In fact, the relationship between the two sides is far more complex than perhaps any figure can likely illustrate. Yet, the picture does clearly convey the tension or conflict that exists between these two objectives.

To further understand how these sometimes competing objectives might be weighed in the mind of military decision makers, it is necessary to enumerate the factors that may emphasize those objectives. The United States national humanitarian values that perceive life, liberty, and justice as moral rights for all individuals are at work to protect innocent civilians. These national values may be further amplified by the personal values held by the decision maker. The strength of these values should not be underestimated, but neither should the support for attacking the military target brought on by the factors found in the concepts of military doctrine and strategy.

 

Figure 1. Relationships of the moral and legal principles of Just War

 

Military doctrine is the collected “best practices” of military operations, built up and tested through the long history of warfare. Nine concepts called the “principles of war” form the bedrock of this doctrine.[144] Of these nine, the principles of mass, economy of force, security, and surprise stand out as particularly important considerations in situations where collateral casualties and damage are concerns. The principle of mass means that the employment of various weapons and techniques will be concentrated so they will decisively achieve the desired outcome. The principle of economy of force calls military leaders to be judicious in applying their forces and resources to ensure that sufficient amounts are available to achieve mass at the needed places and times. The principle of security means that risk will be managed prudently to reduce the vulnerability of one’s own forces to hostile acts or surprise and to preserve combat power. Finally, the principle of surprise allows the military to catch the enemy unprepared by striking at an unanticipated time or place, or in an unexpected manner.

Strategy can be understood as the means by which the objectives for the conflict will be achieved. The task of building a successful strategy is sometimes referred to as “operational art” and consists of multiple elements.[145] Three elements of importance to this paper are leverage, timing, and tempo. Leverage speaks to attaining and maintaining the military advantage over the opponent. Timing and tempo both impact the placement and employment of forces on a schedule and at a pace that best exploits their capabilities while appearing unpredictable to the adversary and inhibiting the enemy’s action. These military concepts, along with others, must be considered by the military member who is in the position of offering advice or making decisions in the course of the targeting cycle.

These doctrinal and strategic concepts carry with them the emphasis provided by years of military field experience, professional military education, and individual professional thought and discussion. Also, many military members do not see these factors as completely inconsistent with the principle of humanity. As the Air Force reminds its legal advisors, victory must be valued as a humanitarian goal in itself, or the United States military should not be there in the first place.[146] Indeed, the injunctions to seek mass, economy of force, security, and surprise, and to use, plan for, and act to maintain leverage, timing, and tempo are all intended to ensure victory. However, even if the objectives of protecting civilians and attacking the military target are both described in humanitarian terms, they remain differentiated by the timeframe of their humanitarian results. Civilian lives preserved by not attacking a target or attacking it less effectively will pay immediate humanitarian benefits that can be easily counted. Lives eventually saved by attacking a target and favorably and quickly ending the war are accrued over time, dependent on subsequent decisions and circumstances, and are thus much more difficult to calculate.

Conflicts are also evident between the tenets of military strategy and doctrine and the principles of Just War and standards of the law of war. The act of issuing warnings to civilians, as conditionally directed by international law, can work against the military desire for surprise. The previously mentioned call by Walzer for the military to take on additional risk in order to lower the risk to innocents can be diametrically opposed to the principle of security that seeks to lower the risk to one’s own forces. The need to pull a high-demand, low-inventory weapon out of reserve and use it on a target because of collateral effects issues can run counter to the idea of economy of force. The desire to lower the destructive effects of an attack to reduce the risk to civilians can fly in the face of the need to mass effects on a critical military target. The additional time required searching for an attack option that sufficiently addresses concerns about collateral casualties and damage can derail a plan that seeks to orchestrate the timing and tempo of its operations in order to maintain leverage over the adversary. Similarly, this issue of time could also be used to drive the tier assessment process to achieve a prudential threshold of “acceptable” civilian casualties instead of a morally optimal minimization of harm to innocents.

Gray Areas and Danger of Bias

This exposition of the conflicts facing military decision makers further describes the murkiness of the moral gray area in which they find themselves. Schmitt describes this zone of grayness as existing “between unmistakably lawful and the unambiguously unlawful conduct.”[147] Kidder quotes Lord Moulton, who called this region of human behavior “the domain of obedience to the unenforceable.”[148] It is within this zone that determinations of proportionality must be made, determinations that McKeogh maintains are, by their nature, easily abused.[149] For this reason, Schmitt asserts that angst over target selection is healthy, in that it fosters congruency and balance between the demands of law, policy, and effective conduct of combat operations.[150] But such congruency and balance would be even more difficult to obtain if there are biases imbedded in the decision environment. McMahan and McKim warned of one such prejudice when they highlighted the issue of national partiality as previously discussed under the Just War moral tradition in Part Three. Such a bias could unfairly weight the objective valued by military necessity because the inherent value of innocent human lives at risk would be reduced by the degree of partiality shown to the members of the decision maker’s own country. Yet, as McMahan and McKim acknowledged, some amount of national partiality might even be permissible and even required in war. One possible reason for such permission is the need to promote and protect morale within the military ranks. However, such considerations of morale could rapidly pose moral problems if the loyalty between military members impeded their view of the strong moral claims of innocent civilians to life and justice. This issue emphasizes why biases in the targeting decision environment must be acknowledged in order to improve the opportunities to promote impartial judgment and “do the right thing.”

The academic discipline of decision analysis, based on the psychology of judgment and choice, offers valuable information about biases in a decision process. A rigorous application of this discipline is beyond the scope of this paper, but important insights of a general nature can assist in further understanding the military decision maker’s task. Fischhoff offers a rationale for why identifying biases is important: people will work harder on an important problem when they recognize both that judgment is central to the problem’s outcome and that bias could pose fallibilities in that judgment.[151] As to where to look for biases, Hogarth asserts that they may correspond to what people can do well.[152] This insight means that some of the potential for bias among decision makers in the military may point right back to the fundamentals of military doctrine and strategy. Collectively, these fundamentals speak to a knowledge base with which military decision makers are comfortable and skilled—what they “do well.” Individually, the applicable principles of war and of operational art previously listed could arguably be considered to naturally be possible biases toward the objective of military necessity for the military decision maker. These would compound the potential bias of national partiality already identified as favoring that same objective. Recalling the Air Force observations mentioned in Part Four that new commanders tend to err on the side of being overly cautious and bypassing “legal” targets, the possible biases towards the humanitarian concerns could be said to include both national and personal humanitarian values.

Figure 2 depicts this murky environment as a moral “decision space” in which the risk to the objectives in conflict within the proportionality decision is shown on each axis. The ideal solution, posing the least risk to both the protection of innocents and the achievement of war objectives, is a single point in the upper right-hand corner of the space. Pushing toward this ideal is the military member’s dual moral roles as described at the end of Part Three: warrior and protector. All other decisions fall elsewhere in the space, favoring one objective over the other, increasing the risk to one or both objectives, or some combination of these effects. Opposing efforts to achieve these two objectives is physical, mental, and emotional stress, as well as the “fog of war.” The decision makers’ biases work to skew the decision to one objective or the other.

 

Figure 2. The Moral Decision-Space

 

The graphic is not intended to judge what is a bad or good proportionality decision, but simply to identify more clearly the competing objectives, the relative risks, and the factors potentially weighting or biasing the decision toward one objective or the other. Describing the decision environment in this way is only the first step toward offering the military decision makers better moral decision support in the midst of their warfighter’s dilemma.