War and the Military

The U.S. Bombing of Iran Is Not an Ethics Issue

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It’s a leadership issue.

I generally don’t want to wander into policy debates unless there is a clear ethical component. Competence. Honesty. Responsibility. Results, as we discuss here so often, are usually the result of moral luck. All we can do, in situations involving high-level leadership decision-making, is evaluate what the basis of the decision was, and the process under which it was made. What happens after that is moral luck, chaos, essentially. As an ethicist, I try not to base my analysis on whether I agree with the decision or not from a policy or pragmatic perspective.

In military and foreign policy decisions, the absence of clear ethical standards are especially rife. There are some who regard any military action at all except in reaction to an attack on the U.S. as unethical, and sometimes not even in that circumstance. They are absolutists: war is wrong, killing is wrong, “think of the children,” and that’s all there is to it. Such people are useless except as necessary reminders that Sherman was right.

President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities is a matter of leadership, not ethics. Leaders lead, and are willing to make tough, often risky, decisions. The U.S. Presidency requires leadership, and strong leadership is not only preferable to weak leadership, it is what the majority of Americans has traditionally preferred. The Constitution clearly shows the Founders’ preference for a strong executive branch, particularly in the area of national defense. Yesterday, the President took advantage of the Constitution’s general approval of executive leadership when national security is involved.

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Ethics Quiz: The Flag Day Parade [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The military parade planned today in my sort-of current hometown city, Washington, D.C., creates no valid basis for criticism…well, except for the Trump Deranged, the foes of the U.S. military, the pacifists (aka.”the deluded”) and in general the same people who find expressions of American patriotism distasteful because they detest the United States, its core values (not socialist or communist) and those who are and have been prepared to defend it.

My father, were he alive and not 105 years old which is what he would have been today if he hadn’t died in 2009, would have gone to see the parade, and not been particularly diplomatic with anyone who protested or criticize it. Dad was U.S. Army through and through (he was also a Boy Scout and family man through and through). He would get up and march all by himself at Fourth of July concerts on the Mall when they played a Sousa march. He would hang out at the W.W.II Memorial wearing his medals, so visiting school groups could see, meet and talk to “a real Second World War Army veteran.”

Yes, Jack Marshall, Sr. would have loved seeing, and, if possible, being a part of President Trump’s grand parade today to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. Making veterans young and old feel proud and appreciated by their country, its Capital and its President is, all by itself, justification for a parade.

Even if this were not the Army’s birthday, Flag Day alone would justify a parade today. The nation has some apologetic grovelling to do after the many examples of disrespect and slander over the decades by such despicable creeps as Colin Kaepernick and his pack of kneelers.

Best of all, from my perspective, is the fact that this is, absurdly, another Pride Month, which features parades and other “Look at us! Aren’t we great?” exercises of narcissism based on how one happens to have sex and whom with. In contrast, veterans really have done something worth celebrating and honoring, and they stand for values and ethics: those who cheer Pride parades and virtue-signalling are ethically estopped from saying a single discouraging word about today’s parade.

Nevertheless,

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of this July 14th is…

Is it responsible and prudent for President Trump to be holding this parade today?

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Ethics Quiz: The USNS Harvey Milk

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

That name is sure to strike terror in the hearts of our enemies.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today ordered the Navy to review the names of its vessels honoring prominent civil rights leaders and other figures of note not exactly identified with the armed services or its mission. The ships include those named for Harvey Milk (above), one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials and a Navy veteran who was assassinated; Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice; Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Harriet Tubman, the heroine of the Underground Railroad; Lucy Stone, an abolitionist and suffragist; Medgar Evers, the assassinated civil-rights leader; labor leader and activist Cesar Chavez, a labor leader; and Dolores Huerta, another labor leader.

Hegseth’s decision, reported by Military.com, is being interpreted by critics as an intentional slap at Pride Month, which is in June. “Secretary Hegseth is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the commander in chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos,” the Pentagon said in a statement today, adding that potential ship renaming “will be announced after internal reviews are complete.”

Your Ethics Alarms Pride Month Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is this order responsible, fair, respectful and ethically justifiable?

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Pope Leo Says “Ramalama-Ding-Dong” In His First Sunday Blessing [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Okay, what he really said was “Never again war.” Same thing.

The reference is to the immortal episode of “The Simpsons” when Lisa heard her father singing along with a popular recording containing a gibberish chorus that is really “Join the Navy” backwards. “You gotta love that crazy chorus,” said Homer. “What does it mean?” asked Lisa. “Eh, it doesn’t mean anything,” he replied. “It’s like “ramalama-ding-dong,” or “give peace a chance.” I have referred to the exchange frequently on Ethics Alarms.

Why? Because empty virtue-signalling is unethical. It is dishonest, cynical and substitutes sentiment for substance. When the Pope said the equivalent of “Give peace a chance,” or “Make love, not war,” or “Let there be peace on earth” or “War is Hell” or FDR’s “I hate war!,” the assembled thousands cheered. It’s an applause line. If the Pope isn’t going to do better than applause lines, what good is he?

The only way to end wars is to end nations and religions, just as John Lennon said in his other fatuous hit, “Imagine.” The only way to do that, is to have a world dictator who is also, unlikely as it seems, benevolent….well, like a Pope! Brilliant!

Influential world figures admired and regarded as serious and thoughtful abuse their position by defaulting to such useless nostrums. They are supposed to make people wiser, not naive and confused. War will not go away, and the Pope knows that, unless he’s an idiot. He is not an idiot.

Raising false hopes and seeking popularity by seeming to advocate the impossible is not ethical behavior. It is the equivalent of a lie.

I officially award Pope Leo the second ever “Imagine” Award, unveiled here, which will be periodically bestowed upon the public figure, pundit , journalist or academic whose pronouncements most reflect virtue-signaling of the late John Lennon.

Short Version of Ethics Verdict on Pentagon’s Elimination of Race, Gender and Ethicity As Legitimate Considerations For Admission to the Service Academies: “Good!”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The Washington Post’s snotty headline is “Hegseth escalates targeting of race, gender in military’s academic settings.” That’s because he’s a racist and sexist, see, like all of the Trump allies, appointees, voters and supporters.

Oh, dear. “[T]he nation’s prestigious military academies” have been ordered “to end consideration of race, gender and ethnicity in their admissions processes” and ‘begin a purge….of educational materials focused on those “divisive concepts,” gasps the Post, as if this isn’t a completely practical and fair policy. The military’s job is to protect the nation and, when necessary, to fight and fight effectively. Race, gender and ethnicity are completely irrelevant to the capability of performing those tasks, so it should be beyond debate that such considerations have no place in the determination of who should gain admission to the military academies.

There is a much stronger case to be made that “diversity” is deleterious to military morale, cohesiveness and performance, but okay, discrimination is contrary to the culture and national values, so we won’t say that women categorically don’t belong in male battle units. But they better be as capable as any of the men.

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The Pete Hegseth Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

By far, the most extreme, controversial and risky Cabinet appointment by President Trump (well, at least until Matt Gaetz dropped out) was the one that put Fox News personality Pete Hegseth in charge of the Defense Department. EA declared the nomination irresponsible at the time, and nothing that has transpired since has changed that assessment. Loyalty is wonderful, but competence is essential. Now NPR is reporting that “The White House has begun the process of looking for a new leader at the Pentagon to replace Pete Hegseth.” The source is a U.S. official “who was not authorized to speak publicly.”

The report makes sense, and if true, it is good and encouraging news. A competent leader recognizes mistakes and moves to fix them rather than digging in and compounding the adverse consequences. The fact that this particular blunder by Trump was throbbingly obvious from the outset doesn’t alter the fact that fixing it as soon as the need to do so becomes undeniable is still the responsible course of action.

The Defense Secretary, incredibly, is again being accused of sharing classified information in a Signal messaging app group chat, this one including his wife, brother, and lawyer. Hegseth reportedly used his personal smartphone while detailing minute-by-minute classified information about airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. This occurred March during the same period in which Hegseth shared similar details with top White House officials in a different Signal chat group that somehow included a virulently anti-Trump progressive journalist.

When baseball managers are in serious trouble during the season, the kiss of death is usually the dreaded “vote of confidence” from the team owner or general manager. This is essentially what President Trump gave Hegseth yesterday, saying, “He’s doing a great job — ask the Houthis how he’s doing!” Meanwhile, Hegseth is employing the Clinton Three-Step (“Deny, deny, deny”) and White House Paid Liar Karoline Leavitt is doing her job, posting on Twitter/X that President Trump “stands strongly” behind Hegseth.

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Not Only Are “Sex Neutral” Physical Fitness Standards For Combat Ethical, They Shouldn’t Be Controversial

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The Pentagon has eliminated lower physical fitness standards for women in combat units via an order by Defense Secretary Hegseth announced yesterday. All physical fitness requirements for combat arms positions will now be be “sex-neutral.” Well, a) GOOD!, and b) Why did anyone ever think it made sense to have it any other way?

The New York Times, being pathetic, spins like crazy to make the order sound mean and discriminatory as well as harmful. The order “is likely to significantly reduce the number of women who meet the requirements,” the paper sniffles, and is “likely to hinder the recruitment and retention of women in particularly dangerous military jobs.” So what? The military sets standards for being qualified for combat, and having different standards for different groups is the epitome of DEI idiocy. Hegseth “argued that women should not be allowed in combat units if they could not meet the same fitness standards as men,” sayeth the Times. Why would he have to argue that at all? What’s the counter-argument? I don’t see one.

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Enough Trivia and Silly Stuff: This Is Incompetence That Can’t Be Ignored

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Ethics Alarms’ “Incompetence Monday” is concluding with a truly damning finale that should set ethics alarms ringing across the Trump Administration. We shall see.

It was revealed today that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed highly classified plans for U.S. troops to attack the Houthi militia in Yemen to an encrypted private chat group. That was irregular enough, but Hegseth didn’t notice that the editor-in-chief of “The Atlantic,” Jeffrey Goldberg, had been added to the text “chat” on the commercial messaging app Signal by Michael Waltz, the national security adviser.

 Goldberg then wrote in an article published today telling readers that he had been mistakenly added into a discussion that could have led to a military disaster if the information had leaked. Great. Goldberg said he followed the conversation among senior members of President Trump’s national security team including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The attacks that were discussed in detail took place two days later. On  March 15, Hegseth posted the “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Goldberg wrote. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East.” 

Goldberg did not publish the details of the war plans in his article. I can think of a lot of journalists who would not have exercised such restraint. Hegseth, and the U.S., were lucky.

There can be no excuse for such an outrageous breach of security. Not only was a journalist inadvertently included in the group, but the conversation also took place outside of the secure government channels reserved for classified discussions and sensitive military planning.

Writing in the New York Times, David French, a former JAG officer, was apoplectic.  Hegseth, he raged, had “just blown his credibility as a military leader.”

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Addendum to “An Ethics Can of Worms: The Mental Health of Airline Pilots”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This has been happening to me a lot lately: I finish a post under the pressure of my large and enthusiastic dog making it painfully obvious that he wants a walk and won’t leave me in peace before he gets one, rush to get it up while he’s pawing at my arm, and then, on the walk, think of something I should have included in the post.

In this case, I should have mentioned the comparison with the military. We don’t want those suffering from mental and emotional illnesses holding guns and defending the country any more than we want them flying planes, but the standards are much, much lower. A “Section 8” draft deferment required far more serious symptoms than chronic depression.

Four famous movies had the issue of mentally ill soldiers at their centers: “Dr. Strangelove…,” “The Dirty Dozen,” “M*A*S*H,” and “Catch 22.” (I never could figure out what was the problem with Trini Lopez in “The Dirty Dozen” except for his obsession with songs about vegetation.) My father was somewhat bitter about the low standards WWII draftees were subject to, I assume because his foot was almost blown off because of a member of Dad’s platoon who had an IQ in the sixties.

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Ethics Quote of the Year (So Far): Donald Sensing

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

“Finally, hating Trump is merely cheap virtue signaling. It is neither a method nor a plan. But if you feel better about hating Trump than you feel bad about Ukrainians getting killed with no end in sight, then you are morally bankrupt and God forbid you have any say in what happens.”

—-Military expert, commentator and Methodist minister Daniel Sensing concluding his blog post, “‘I stand with Ukraine’ means what, exactly?”

Last night, probably the smartest and most reliably reasonable of my Trump-Deranged lawyer friends published a much-loved diatribe on Facebook condemning President Trump for the Oval Office meltdown with Zelenskyy last week. He doesn’t post often, but every one recently has been to take issue with a Trump, quote, policy or action. I’ve had to wrestle my metaphorical tongue to the floor every time. It would do no good to rebut him, and all my effort would do would diminish the respect he has for me because, on this topic, his powers of reasoning are gone. If I wanted to start a stampede of unfriending on my Facebook page, I would point him to the superb post by Donald Sensing flagged this morning on Instapundit by Prof. Glenn Reynolds. My friend would never see the post otherwise, since Reynolds’ legendary blog is relentlessly conservative and my friend would sooner draw a pentagram on his kitchen floor than sample anything written there. But Sensing, whose fascinating CV is here and who is better qualified to opine on the Ukraine-Russian conflict than either of us, has provided a superb analysis with clarity and logical force.

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