Abstract
United States Army Special Forces who deployed to Iraq in mid-2014, and who were seeking to help Iraqi forces to combat Islamic State (ISIL) faced a considerable challenge: how could a force of fewer than 50 operators provide guidance and support to their Iraqi allies (mostly Iraqi Special Forces units who had been trained by U.S. forces prior to the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011) while also keeping in line with Washington’s policy of seeking to avoid any possibility of combat casualties among deployed U.S. Special Forces? Their solution to this dilemma came to be dubbed ‘Remote Advise and Assist’ (RAA). By cobbling together a system of voice and text communications, cameras, interactive maps and mobile handsets, these Special Forces personnel found they could ‘virtually accompany’ their Iraqi partners into hot zones where U.S. boots on the ground were forbidden. This approach seems to have been extremely successful, but potentially raises a range of ethical concerns. Against the backdrop of a general account of the ethics of employing surrogate forces, this paper explores the ethical questions raised by the practice of ‘Remote Advise and Assist’.
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Notes
For example, Paul W. Kahn, Director of the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights, has argued that ‘riskless warfare’ is at heart “a violation of the fundamental principle that establishes the internal morality of warfare: self-defense within conditions of reciprocal imposition of risk”(Kahn 2002).
This is not to say that RAA does not potentially pose significant challenges of a different nature. For example, Peter Lee points out that the advent of RPAs has posed a very significant challenge to the self-identity and ethos of aircrew. He reports that in numerous interviews with RAF Predator or Reaper operators he has repeatedly asked the question ‘When asked, how do you describe what you do in the RAF?’ He reports that “Those who transferred from piloting another aircraft type—Tornado, Harrier, Hercules—gave almost identical answers that can be summarized as: ‘I am a pilot who now flies the Reaper’, as opposed to, ‘I am a Reaper pilot’ ” (Lee 2012). Given the strong ethos of physical strength and endurance, physical courage and martial skill associated with SOF it seems at least worth considering the possibility that if RAA becomes a growing part of the SOF role this might come to threaten that self-identity among SOF personnel.
For an in-depth discussion of contingent pacifism see Alexandra and Dobos (2018).
Even if one is willing to accept contingent pacifism there is another, unexpected challenge—as I have pointed out elsewhere (Baker 2015), there is no reason that this kind of reductive argument could not lead just as easily to contingent realism.
Email communication with the author, 28/03/2017.
See Bart (2014).
I am grateful to LTCOL Eric Roitsch, US Army Special Forces, for a very helpful discussion which helped shape this part of the paper.
As I explain elsewhere, Feaver is using these terms in the technical sense of principal-agent theory: “‘Working’ is relatively unproblematic—an agent is working when she is diligently pursuing the tasks assigned to her by her superior. In the case of the military, the military is working when it diligently seeks to fulfil the wishes of its civilian overseers. ‘Shirking’, on the other hand, requires more exploration. In the everyday sense, shirking is simply failing to work, and is often associated with laziness and general inactivity. While this may well sometimes apply to the military, it is not however the central meaning of the term as used in agency theory. For the military may be vigorously pursuing military and/or policy goals, but it will still be shirking if those goals do not correspond with the desires of the civilian principal.”
Major General Gregory J. Lengyel, opening remarks to the “Resistance and Resilience” Seminar (Baltic Defence College, Tartu, Estonia, 4 November 2014). Quoted in Christman (2017).
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Baker, DP. Special operations remote advise and assist: an ethics assessment. Ethics Inf Technol 21, 1–10 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9483-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9483-3