George R. Lucas - Ethics and Military Strategy in the 21st Century: Moving Beyond Clausewitz

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Ethics and Military Strategy in the 21st Century

This book examines the importance of military ethics in the formulation and conduct of contemporary military strategy.

Clausewitzs original analysis of war relegated ethics to the side-lines in favor of political realism, interpreting the proper use of military power solely to further the political goals of the state, whatever those may be. This book demonstrates how such single-minded focus no longer suffices to secure the interest of states, for whom the nature of warfare has evolved to favor strategies that hold combatants themselves to the highest moral and professional standards in their conduct of hostilities. Waging war has thus been transformed in a manner that moves beyond Clausewitzs original conception, rendering political success wholly dependent upon the cultivation and exercise of discerning moral judgment by strategists and combatants in the field. This book utilizes a number of perspectives and case studies to demonstrate how ethics now plays a central role in strategy in modern armed conflict.

This book will be of much interest to students of just war, ethics, military strategy, and international relations.

George Lucas is Professor Emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy and Naval Postgraduate School, and currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the Naval Academy. Lucas is author of Ethics and Cyber Warfare (2017) and Military Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know (2016), and editor of the Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics (2015).

War, Conflict and Ethics

Series Editors:

Michael L. Gross

University of Haifa

and

James Pattison

University of Manchester

Ethical judgments are relevant to all phases of protracted violent conflict and interstate war. Before, during, and after the tumult, martial forces are guided, in part, by their sense of morality for assessing whether an action is (morally) right or wrong, an event has good and/or bad consequences, and an individual (or group) is inherently virtuous or evil. This new book series focuses on the morality of decisions by military and political leaders to engage in violence and the normative underpinnings of military strategy and tactics in the prosecution of the war.

Just War Thinkers

From Cicero to the 21st Century

Edited by Daniel R. Brunstetter and Cian ODriscoll

Contemporary Just War

Theory and Practice

Tamar Meisels

Just American Wars

Ethical Dilemmas in U.S. Military History

Eric Patterson

Ethics and Military Strategy in the 21st Century

Moving Beyond Clausewitz

George Lucas

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/War-Conflict-and-Ethics/book-series/WCE

Ethics and Military Strategy in the 21st Century

Moving Beyond Clausewitz

George Lucas

First published 2020

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 George R. Lucas, Jr.

The right of George Lucas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Names: Lucas, George R., author.

Title: Ethics and military strategy in the 21st century : moving beyond Clausewitz / George Lucas.

Other titles: Moving beyond Clausewitz

Description: First edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2019] | Series: War, conflict and ethics | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019006308 (print) | LCCN 2019007109 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351745185 (Web PDF) | ISBN 9781351745178 (ePub) | ISBN 9781351745161 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781138731073 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138731097 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315189123 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Military ethics. | Just war doctrine. | WarHistory 21st century. | War (Philosophy) | Strategy.

Classification: LCC U22 (ebook) | LCC U22 .L777 2019 (print) | DDC 172/.42dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006308

ISBN: 978-1-138-73107-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-73109-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-18912-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Kimberly Lucas, Esq., Attorney at Law and Major Hai Peng, U.S. Army Reserve/Defense Intelligence Agency

Two staunch defenders of democracy and human rights, on the occasion of their wedding.

Contents

I wish to acknowledge my heartfelt thanks to faculty and students at the Inamori Center for Ethics & Excellence at Case-Western Reserve University (Cleveland OH), and especially to their visionary director, Professor Shannon E. French, for three wonderful years spent serving as a visiting fellow and adjunct professor in their new Masters Degree program in Military Ethics, following my retirement from the U.S. Department of Defense, during which the ideas for this book were conceived, and the project itself brought to fruition.

At the beginning of the first Gulf War in 1991, Umberto Eco wrote a short essay for an Italian magazine, entitled Reflections on war. He contrasted war as it was then being fought in the deserts of Kuwait with modern war, as described by Karl von Clausewitz. According to Eco, the Clausewitzian conception of war is a thoroughly conventional, modernistic, state-centered enterprise, a chess game in which the object is not simply to take the opponents pieces, but ultimately to attain complete domination, or checkmate. Indeed, it strengthens the contrast that Eco proceeds to draw by first recalling that Clausewitz himself used explicitly Newtonian metaphors, drawn from classical (early modern) physics, to describe the contest of political wills between nation-states as analogous to physical forces acting upon a center of gravity, seeking to move that center to a more favorable position by breaking the political will and overcoming the military forces of ones adversary.

After two world wars and the Cold War, by contrast, Umberto Eco believed war could no longer be characterized in this modernist, Newtonian fashion as Clausewitz had attempted, in terms of the straightforward linear vectors of force operating between clearly defined rival centers of power (any more, we might add, than can classical physics handle the anomalies of relativity or quantum mechanics). In his interesting essay, Eco instead quoted his fellow postmodernist, Michel Foucault, to the effect that power is no longer monolithic and monocephalous: it is diffused, packeted, made of the continuous agglomeration and breaking down of consensus. War, Eco went on to observe, pits a multiplicity of powers in competition with one another: no longer simply two opposing states, but the controlling governments of states versus their own internal, rival political parties and religious factions; the media, embedded and reporting from behind enemy lines; Wall Street and the financial sector, heavily invested in hope of profit, but with no clear strategic goal or financial objective, just (especially in the case of the stock market) oscillations in the play of powers.

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