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Response to Michael Gross: Military Ethics, Insurgency, and the Rise of ‘Soft War’

Michael Gross’s latest book (Gross 2015) and his introductory article in this issue of the Journal of Military Ethics are clearly onto something extremely important: if rules and principles can be discerned that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable means of fighting conventional wars between states, then why would we not, in principle, be able likewise to distinguish between both better and worse causes for civil war and insurgency? And just as importantly, why should we not be able to discriminate between acceptable and unacceptable means of conducting such warfare within states (rather than, as at present, tending to condemn all such wars, and their methods, without distinction)? Certainly Michael Walzer’s brief treatment of guerilla warfare (and his analysis of the tactic of terrorism as a means of pursuing it) had pointed the way, and indicated a need for an extended treatment of the sort Gross now proposes to provide. Walzer’s famous example of the Russian insurgent who refrained from tossing a grenade into the carriage of a nobleman (because the nobleman’s son was riding alongside) provides a case in point (Walzer 2000: chs. 11, 12; esp. pp. 197–204). Thus one might (as Gross does) distinguish between civilians who volunteer, versus those who are coerced at gunpoint, to serve as human shields; or methods of terrorism that target the adversaries’ military and police forces, versus those that target all civilians indiscriminately; or likewise, the taking of members of those same opposition security forces as prisoners in order to use them as hostages for barter, versus the taking of innocent bystanders with no clear stake in the fighting as prisoners for hostage barter, let alone for purposes of symbolic killing (as has been the case most recently with the Islamic State). Like many Americans, for example, I was furious over the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Still it seemed subsequently that there was something qualitatively different about an armed suicide attack carried out by terrorists against uniformed military personnel aboard a hostile warship in their own territory, as distinguished from a wholly indiscriminate attack upon random civilians going about their business in their own country (as happened a year later in New York and Washington, DC, on 11 September 2001). We lack a coherent conceptual framework, however, to discriminate between such attacks, and desperately need to be able to do so.