CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

ased on functional output alone, and unless it is focussed on higher external ethics, an
army risks the moral bankruptcy of the Waffen SS. Soldiers must know that what they
do is right, and that they have the support of their nation, their society, and their
government.’ 254 To a degree this mixes up the instrumental and the existential but the
point is clear: for the British Army being an effective killing machine is not enough; it
is not an end in itself. Shortly before retiring as Adjutant General of the British Army,
Lieutenant General Sir Alistair Irwin reinforced the point when talking to officers about
to take command of units:
(A)s servants of the nation, prepared to engage in mortal combat in the nation’s
interests, we must all of us share some basic principles upon which we base our
lives and our soldiering. … ….
No one, winner or loser, will survive unscathed as a moral being if he has
engaged in bestiality. And worse no member of the organisation, or even the
nation, to which that person belongs, can possibly dismiss it later as having been
of no significance. 255
In other words, we are all diminished as human beings if we engage in activity that is
‘inhuman’. General Irwin acknowledged that two of the British Army’s ‘Core Values’,
Integrity and Respect for Others, are not essential, in an instrumental sense, for the
creation of fighting power: the examples of ‘the Vikings, the Mongols, the Italians in
Ethiopia, the Germans in Russia, the Japanese in China’ all militate against such a
claim. But at the individual level, and corporately as a nation, there is a price to pay for
inhumane behaviour – a loss of individual and corporate sense of humanity and worth.
The quote above (p142) from Army Doctrine Publication Land Operations shows that
in its latest iteration British military doctrine recognises the importance of moral issues
and now interprets the Moral Component of fighting power much more broadly than
‘getting people to fight.’
The issue of individual and corporate humanity links also to that of individual and
corporate pride and guarding of reputation. Rev Andrew Totten, an Army chaplain,
contends that beyond the instrumental or ‘managerial’ effectiveness of the military,
there is an ‘existential dimension of soldiering … (that) is vital to the Army’s moral
basis.’ 256 He offers the analogy of a football club seeking to win its league:
At one level the match results will be the measure of the team’s ‘instrumental
effectiveness’. At another …… …. The results will be taken as a measure of
‘managerial effectiveness’. What remains is often overlooked: those footballers
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