Moral Decision Support for the Warfighter

Given the difficulties of the proportionality decision that are still left unanswered by the approaches thus covered, it seems clear that military decision makers could benefit significantly from additional decision support targeted at these issues. Left unaddressed, biases could lead these military members directly into one of several traps in their moral thinking. It is important to outline some of the more likely pitfalls, and some current and new approaches to helping military members avoid them.

Obstacles to Moral Decision Making

The Josephson Institute has defined one set of common obstacles to moral decision making, of which three are particularly applicable to the targeting process.[153] The first obstacle is a rationalization: “If it’s necessary, it’s moral.” In this case, the rationalization leads to the false assumption that military necessity breeds propriety. The second obstacle is the “false necessity trap,” in which necessity is treated as a fact versus an interpretation. Here the cost of further reducing collateral casualties is overestimated, while the cost of failing to do so is underestimated. The last obstacle is, “If it’s legal and permissible, it’s proper.” This is a rationalization that assumes that one may substitute legal requirements that set minimal behavior standards (such as in Fuller’s “morality of duty”) for personal moral judgment. While the necessary and legal option may indeed be an individual’s moral choice as well, the obstacles above point to possible pitfalls on the path to doing the right thing—pitfalls the military decision maker should be equipped to avoid.

Glover, in his moral and psychological review of significant acts of war in the last century, asserts that there are multiple dangers posed in the wartime environment to an individual’s two moral resources: human responses and moral identity.[154] He assesses that the human responses of respect and sympathy are difficult to maintain at any significant strength in a war involving great distances between the decision makers and the attack. This long-range separation is inherent in air strikes, and especially so for the planning staffs and senior leaders that prepare and send the aircraft on their missions. A reduction or absence of respect and sympathy echoes the warning of national partiality introduced in Part Three and discussed in Part Six as a source of bias. This threat to moral resources is particularly insidious because it is driven by an inherent characteristic of attack from the air—distance.

If human responses are so easily suppressed in attacks from the air, Glover maintains that moral identity can also be neutralized, but in complex ways along the same lines as the Josephson Institute’s obstacles to moral decisions.[155] Glover describes moral identity as the way that an individual cares about being one kind of person or another. At the core of this identity are moral commitments, such as respect for loyalty or an abhorrence of cruelty. There are three ways that Glover specifies that the protections of moral identity can be eroded: moral inertia, fragmentation of responsibility, and the moral slide of precedents.[156] First, institutional momentum can translate into moral inertia. This can occur when decisions are made and morally justified based on specific circumstances, yet are not reevaluated when those circumstances change. Within a targeting process, participants could find it much less troubling to their moral identity to continue the established targeting policy rather than to question it or to press for a new policy. Second, so many people can have a role in a decision that no one feels particularly responsible. While at first glance this mechanism seems inconsistent with the military’s defined role of “commander,” Glover provides an example in which even a past President of the United States felt that others in his administration dictated a portion of his options. Thus, the targeting process headed by a military commander and supported by a very large staff, might also be susceptible to this eroding influence. Third, successive decisions can slide by degrees from slight, but morally justifiable, harm to devastating impacts that never would have been countenanced if evaluated alone. Each successive targeting decision could establish a precedent that is, in turn, used to assist in justifying the next decision. While all of these three “neutralizers” can operate in any wartime decision environment, they would be particularly difficult to detect using current methods of decision support in those situations where war objectives and ideals are at risk.

Current Decision Support

Operating within this setting of conflicting principles and potential biases and working to oppose breakdowns in moral resources are three related mechanisms: the professional military ethic within each military member, the law of war training provided regularly to them, and the counsel available from military legal advisors. Together these mechanisms make similar contributions to the decision environment surrounding issues of collateral casualties and damage.

The professional military ethic as described by Hartle does not specifically mention either of the objectives held in tension under the concept of proportionality: the protection of innocents and achieving military objectives. However, individual military members will not necessarily view the ethic’s principles as neutral or equally applicable to both the humanitarian and military necessities. For example, “do your duty” can be easily viewed as supporting either or both of these concerns. Yet, the professional military ethic does share a very clear tie to both the law of war training program and the role of military legal advisors: all are directly associated with the interpretation of the international law of war. Since it is the legal community in the military that interprets these laws and instructs other military members about them through the law of war training program, legal advisors play a particularly key role in this decision environment. How they interpret international law can have a significant effect on the actions and considerations considered “right” under the professional military ethic and within the law of war training program. Therefore, whatever role the collective legal advisors play in assisting decision makers to negotiate both the legal and moral issues inherent in the proportionality principle, it is likely to be strongly reflected in the implementation of the military ethic and training on the law of war. Yet despite their current and generally competent roles in moral issues, counseling on issues of morality that exceed legal and political guidance—those that lay in Moulton’s domain of the unenforceable—is not a principal, assigned duty for legal advisors in the targeting process. The primary expertise of these advisors is in legal matters.

Nevertheless, the inherent tensions and conflicts, the potential biases, and the possible obstacles to moral decisions in the targeting process are significant, but may be deemed manageable in the emotions, chaos, and stress of a war that the United States is winning. America has grown accustomed to the character and training of its military members enabling largely good and right decisions, but both America and its military have also become accustomed to victory. One question that cannot be answered with certainty is whether the level of preparation of military members for facing the altered character of moral challenges is adequate for a war that they appear to be losing. The seemingly docile nature of the conflicts, biases, and obstacles discussed above could easily become more tyrannical in a conflict that is not going favorably and that may even appear to threaten the loss of the objectives for which the war is being fought. United States military doctrine recognizes multiple factors that have historically led to the commission of war crimes. Several of these conditions are consistent with wars that are difficult to fight and win: a high number of friendly losses; a high turnover rate in the decision-making hierarchy; the lack of a clearly defined adversary; and a high frustration level among military personnel.[157] If such conditions have historically led to cases of moral failure, then careful consideration should be given to ways to counter morally corrosive effects that will threaten again in future conflicts.

The United States military also recognizes that combat operations can become much more morally challenging in coming years as adversaries increasingly try to take advantage of the fact that the United States military will always seek to comply with the law of war.[158] Positioning high-value military targets in civilian neighborhoods is one form of this immoral and illegal tactic seen in several recent conflicts. An upsurge of such practices could place warriors in greater moral dilemmas than ever. In that case, reliance on current decision support resources that emphasize legal and political requirements may not be sufficient to fully meet the demands of morality.

New Approaches to Moral Decision Support

The first new step in guarding against the threat of unethical decisions is to acknowledge and address the possibilities of bias in the decision process. Determining what are biases and what are legitimate considerations requires some amount of personal moral examination. However, it may also be possible to use concepts from decision analysis to assist in guarding against prejudices in a more general way. Edwards and von Winterfeldt offer four strategies for de-biasing decision processes.[159] These strategies are: 1) Warn of the problem; 2) Describe the problem; 3) Provide personalized feedback; 4) Train extensively. In addition, these authors also point to the importance of intellectual tools in de-biasing decision making. Together, these ideas offer opportunities to assist the military decision maker.

Beginning with the de-biasing strategies of warn, describe, and train, one can envision possible changes to the law of war training program and the real-time advice made available to decision makers in the course of making their judgments. Law of war training could be altered to include alerting military members to the factors that could bias their judgment in future proportionality decisions. These potential biases would not only be listed (“warn”), but also discussed in terms of how they relate to the often-opposing objectives of protecting innocents and achieving the war’s military aims (“describe”). The diagram of the Moral Decision-Space would serve as a training aid for these presentations. Case studies would be used in the training to provide important exposure to the complexity of the decision environment and the power of the potential biases. Reflection on cases from recent history would be particularly useful, especially if accompanied by feedback on the actual, known outcomes.

Such training could help in the period prior to actual military operations, but once the targeting cycle is in full swing for planning and execution, no decision maker will have the time to spend in a classroom or even individual training sessions. Here, the actions of warning, describing, and limited on-the-job training would have to fall to a trusted advisor or team of advisors skilled in the application of ethics and decision-making principles to real world situations. Schmitt agrees that there may be a role for ethical specialists in the targeting cycle.[160] He describes the possible role of these moral advisors as working side-by-side with legal advisors toward the common goal of conducting operations rightly—neither unlawfully nor unethically. Thus both training and counsel from advisors would focus on the practical moral and decision-analysis aspects of the decision process. This type of collaboration could greatly benefit military members participating in the targeting cycle.

The last of Edwards and von Winterfeldt’s strategies, “Provide personalized feedback,” would require that the Department of Defense take a different position than that publicly acknowledged regarding post-strike fact-finding. As mentioned in Part Two, the United States government has stated that it does not seek to comprehensively track collateral casualties and damage. This position is reflected in the unclassified Joint[161] and Air Force[162] directives that address combat assessment, the post-strike phase in which efforts are made to determine the weapon’s actual effects. The process of combat assessment seeks to determine whether the target must be struck again or whether effectiveness models and planning parameters require updating. These directives do not contain any mention of collateral casualty or damage assessment or reporting procedures.

Whether such assessments and reporting have already been directed and taken place within classified channels, or whether the Department of Defense must focus new effort in this area, these determinations would be absolutely essential to permit feedback to occur. Such an assessment has taken place in at least one high-profile incident during OEF. The United States military announced the morning after the air strikes on Deh Rawod that a fact-finding team consisting of military representatives and representatives of the Afghan government, the American embassy, and the media would be conducting an immediate on-site assessment.[163] Making this type of information rapidly available whenever possible to the staff involved in the targeting cycle is critical to short-circuiting potential biases. Hogarth states in his study of “continuous processes” that feedback is central in aiding people to adapt to decision environments of this type.[164] In particular, he highlights the importance of the speed and frequency at which the feedback becomes available, and the accuracy and trustworthiness of the information provided.[165] In the midst of the furor of competing and conflicting considerations, the military decision maker deserves the benefit of the most accurate and timely feedback available concerning the effects of recent air strikes on innocent civilians.

Edwards and von Winterfeldt also assert that intellectual tools can play an important role in dispelling what they call “cognitive illusions.”[166] Such tools exist in the area of applied ethics in the form of tests. One of the more common tests is known as the “Washington Post Test.” Hedhal advocates this test for use by military personnel in particular because of its emphasis on the public servant’s obligation to maintain the public’s trust.[167] Implementing the test requires the users to ask themselves: “What decision would I make if I knew that my actions would be on the front page of tomorrow’s Washington Post?”

Another test, referenced in the literature, is called here the “virtual substitution test.” The basis for this tool was previously mentioned in Part Three as Christopher enjoined decision makers not to strike a target and place innocent civilians at risk unless the decision makers were willing to substitute their own innocent civilians for those at risk. This tool would specifically guard against the bias of national partiality. Taking the tool to the next level, decision makers would virtually substitute civilians that the decision makers know personally (acquaintances, friends, family), in order to guard against other biases, such as insufficient time or resources that might unfairly weight the cause of military necessity. These biases could lead to premature conclusions that the military target is “worth” a certain number of civilian lives simply because the identities of the civilians were unknown to the decision maker. Kidder offers a third tool, testing for “trilemma” options.[168] This tool helps the decision maker faced with a moral quandary by not forcing a choice between two similarly “right” options, but by prompting the question: “Is there a third way through this dilemma?” Military members using this tool would be acting responsibly by seeking a better way to meet both of the competing objectives in a proportionality decision. They might also be acting in accordance with Article 57 of Protocol I that enjoins military decision makers to consider alternate, suitable military targets if doing so will help minimize harm to innocent civilians. The “trilemma” tool along with the other strategies discussed here is overlaid in the moral decision-space depicted in Figure 3. There, they act against any prejudicial influence that may have improperly weighted the military target in the proportionality decision.

Figure 3. Anti-bias strategies overlaid on the Moral Decision-Space

The potential existence of these biases and the proffering of strategies to acknowledge and address them is not an assertion or inference that military members are weak in virtue. To the contrary, the senior leaders with which the author has personally served have been of outstanding moral character. However, the biases just identified are a natural product of the decision environment and the humanity of the decision makers. The combination of the pressures and high-stakes of the wartime decision environment, the moral-legal tensions and resulting conflicts, and the well-trained, but fallible, human beings making the decisions are unavoidable factors. It is precisely because these factors are inescapable that the human decision makers deserve the highest quality decision support that can be made available to them.