Marc LiVecche - The Good Kill: Just War and Moral Injury

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Oxford University Press 2021

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Names: LiVecche, Marc, author.

Title: The good kill: just war and moral injury / Marc LiVecche.

Description: New York, NY: Oxford University Press, [2021] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020037846 (print) | LCCN 2020037847 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780197515808 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780197515822 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Just war doctrine. | War (Philosophy)

Classification: LCC U22 .L588 2021 (print) | LCC U22 (ebook) |

DDC 172/.42dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037846

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037847

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197515808.001.0001

To those who fight not for love of fighting, but for what they defend; to the commanders and chaplains who support their doing so; to those who teach (or taught) them all howmost especially JBE. And to my family: Kara, Dominic, and Naomi (who help make clear why we fight).

I contend that fortitude in war has its roots in morality.

Lord Moran

While at first blush it might seem ironic, if not contradictory, for an Army Chaplain to write in support of a book entitled The Good Kill, in fact it is not so. As he identifies in this work, Marc LiVecche is both a Christian realist and a scholar of military ethics practically interested in helping warriors either prevent or recover from moral injury. While not necessarily claimed as a pastoral impulse, his motivation to fortify the warrior through the ethical lens of the just war tradition flags LiVecche as an ally in my task as Padre to help those who bear the cost of battle, often long after they have left the battlefield. Both of us are concerned with the care and maintenance of the imago dei of those who serve in the profession of arms, that is, in shorthand, with the care of their souls.

Books such as this are always relevant, but The Good Kill is all the more timely given our growing understanding of moral injury as an enduring cost of war. LiVecches signal contribution is helping warfighters think rightly about the morally traumatic aspects of warfighting; here, the basic task of killing the enemy. Importantly, LiVecche doesnt dismiss this trauma; he contextualizes it, as he does when reflecting upon the importance of intention in the use of lethal force or when making crucial distinctions between moral and nonmoral evil, guilt and grief, and moral injury and moral bruising. More than this, however, The Good Kill has significance for to the profession of arms that goes beyond any pastorally collaborative intent I share with my colleague, rich as our alliance has been and will continue to be.

This work is all the more vital because warfare in the twenty-first century is rapidly contextualizing along a trajectory hitherto unknown in human history. Because of the rapid and ever-increasing development of technology in relation to warfare, the most salient feature of this new pathway will be a marked increase of the speed of war, particularly decision-making. As artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous weapons systems (AWS) become ever more predominate on the battlefield, new questions emerge as to how much control human beings will retain of future combat. Given the rise of fifth-domain warfare and multidomain battlesimultaneous, integrated combat action in and through land, sea, air, space, and cyberspacethere is a basis to wonder whether traditional constructs such as land borders, the rule of law, and regulatory theories such as the moral frameworks of jus ad bello and jus in bello will continue to allow militaries to maintain control of warfare in concert with national interests.

In the midst of such changes, however, some things will remain the same. While nation states will make the increasingly thorny problem of conventional conflict with peer or near-peer competitors the centerpiece of their strategic concepts and plans, proxy and civil wars and nonstate terrorism will continue to flourish, as will the threats of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear war. Moreover, such ongoing threats will endanger an increasingly urbanized world. In 1950, the worlds city-dwelling population was 746 million. In 2018, it was 4.2 billion. History reminds usnowhere more horrifically than the recent battle for Aleppo in Syriaof wars ruinous horrors when operations occur in high-density cities. Urban combat tends to be a long, plodding nightmare of attrition resulting in staggering resource costs and human casualties as well as taking a severe toll on quotidian goods such as health, dignity, education, and livelihoods. Advanced technologies can mitigate these costs, but they cannot eliminate them. Smart weapons and precision strikes are only as good as the information that supports themand the commitment to use them. Mistakes happen. And the longer high-intensity combat continues, the greater the possibility that even the most ethically committed warfighters will falter in their commitment to discrimination and proportionality. The onset of high-speed, incredibly destructive combat in densely packed urban settings in and among civilians will make plain the continued cost of warnot just in the physical devastation of urban infrastructures and human bodies, but in the moral and spiritual wounds that transgress the human soul.

As Unites States Army operational doctrine states, War is chaotic, lethal, and a fundamentally human endeavor. It is a clash of wills fought among and between people. All war is inherently about changing human behavior, with each side trying to alter the behavior of the other by force of arms. However much combat changes, it remains that people will continue to be the singular political and military center of gravity in future war. This is essential to comprehend. In war, the center of gravity is that which decisively affords a combatant freedom of action and advantage over an opponent. Thus, one must defend ones center of gravity at all costs while seeking to attack and negate the effect of an opponents center of gravity

The Good Kill registers this basic truth: war will remain a human contest of national will and policy, but one still fought by warriors who are human beings before they are combatants. Advancements in both AI and AWS are bearing this truth out, as nation states are regulating new technologies with increasing human control precisely because it is in their best interests to do so. How and why? At a practical level, weve all read enough sci-fi to know that the enemy can always breach and compromise preprogrammed network and technological systems that we have given independent battlefield autonomy. But at another level, human beings, at present, are alone capable of the kind of ad-hoc, discreet, reflective moral judgments that on the battlefield so often mark the distinction between an atrocity and a good kill.