CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

individual level is the view that absence of justification, or doubt about cause, is likely
to be a frictional factor, and thus diminish fighting effectiveness.
We are reminded, again, of the need to differentiate between what makes men fight, or
fight well, in conflict from what motivates them to join the armed forces, either in
peacetime or in response to actual or likely conflict. Thus moral justification is likely to
have a different role for the long-term professional than the role it has for the short-term
volunteer or conscript. Visiting Iraq in 2005 as Colonel of the Princess of Wales’s
Royal Regiment, Richard Holmes found a marked difference between the attitudes and
opinions of the largely National Guard and Army Reserve US servicemen and the
mainly regular British soldiers. (The impact on Britain’s reservists is discussed below).
The US guardsmen regarded themselves as being ‘at war.’ Given the scale and the
shock of the terrorist attacks of 11 Sep 2001 and the widespread acceptance in the US,
despite the lack of any convincing evidence, of a link between the perpetrators and the
Iraqi regime, this is not surprising. To many Americans the Iraq war was a clearly just
response to unprovoked aggression that struck at the heart of America and her way of
life. In the UK no such linkage took hold in the public imagination. Moreover, it was
not until July 2005 that the UK suffered any direct attack from Al Qaeda, by which time
any linkage with the Iraq war was more logically as cause (despite UK Government
insistence to the contrary) rather than effect. UK soldiers tended, then, to take a more
sanguine view of themselves as ‘on operations’ which implies routinely, and somewhat
resignedly, fulfilling the policy of government. In the enduring operation that Iraq has
become that is just as natural a response for a full-time professional as is the need for
ideological motivation to bolster the morale of National Guardsmen whose lives have
been turned upside down by a one-year compulsory call-out to face both the danger and
the monotony of operations in Iraq.
British Military Doctrine understands military effectiveness in terms of ‘fighting power,
which is then understood to be composed of three components: Physical, Conceptual
and Moral (see Figure 2-5). Although recognizing that such factors as ‘self-respect’ and
‘sense of purpose’ have a part to play, which we might relate to ethical issues, as
presented here the Moral Component is rather narrowly defined in purely instrumental
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