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Hi-Phi Nation Season OneWritten, Produced, and Edited by Barry LamEpisode 2: Moral Exploitation (Full Transcript)Trump: we are living in a time that's as evil as any time that there has ever been. We have, right now, a country that's under siege. We're, like, living in medieval times. Yes, I would bring back waterboarding and I'd make it a hell of a lot worse and don't tell me it doesn't work; torture works, okay folks? Believe me, it works.Barry: living in fear and citing torture as a justified and effective method of protection; it isn’t new; it happened fifteen years ago and today, the soldiers who went through it the first time around have some things to say about it.Bush: good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger. In this conflict, America faces an enemy that has no regard for conventions of war, for rules of morality...Barry: that war even has rules of morality is a little puzzling. The point of war is to kill and destroy. If it's okay to go to war, why should any other tactics count as immoral? You’re listening to Hi-Phi Nation, a show about philosophy that turns story into ideas. I'm Barry Lam. I didn't want to think about these questions: about the philosophy of war in the abstract, so I sought out some soldiers who fought in our most recent wars to draw the philosophy out of their stories.Ian: I’m Ian Fishback. I'm a PhD student at the University of Michigan. I served for about fourteen years in the Army from 2001 to 2014. two combat tours with 82nd Airborne Division two combat tours with this special forces group.Barry: we begin Ian’s story in the middle of his second deployment in 2003. The 82nd airborne was called to an Iraqi town on the Syrian border called Al-Qa’im. Ian: That was actually the worst place I've ever been. People were actually openly carrying arms and attacking Americans in broad daylight.Barry: when the 82nd airborne got to Al-Qa’im, the commander of the 3rd ACR said that attacks against American troops had gone up by about three hundred percent since they had arrived. Third ACR means 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. These were armored tank fighters. They didn't have a way to move large number of soldiers around on foot or what they call dismounted infantry. The 82nd had the right kind of vehicles and troops trained for those kinds of operations. This was called Operation Rifles Blitz and Ian led his unit of dismounted soldiers together with a unit from the 3rd ACR.Ian: and we went out on our first raid and there were multiple raids simultaneously across the city and the particular raid I was on, we were in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle which is kind of like a tank and then we had actual Abrams tanks which are the really big main battle tanks and the technique that they had come up with for a raid was they would identify the house that they wanted to target and that the house would have a kind of a courtyard around it with maybe a eight-foot tall clay-brick wall and there'd be a gate. Well, what they would do is they would take the Abrams tank and they would run over that wall and cave it in, create a breach, back out and then the Bradley Fighting Vehicle would go in, let out the dismounted infantry. The dismounted infantry would go into a very quick clear of the house and all to grab anyone of military age. This is kind of destructive and the first target we went to, we went through the breaching procedures: run over the wall, going into the house. When we went in and we ran over the wall, the patrol leader from the third ACR said, “oh, this is the wrong house.” So then, we back out after we've caved in their wall, basically, with a tank, and then we go hit another house. He goes, “oh, this is the wrong house, too.” This was going on all over because there are multiple raids across the city going on and I just remember coming out and saying, “you know, I've got a theory about why attacks have gone up three hundred percent since you got here.”Barry: Ian proposes an alternative to the 3rd ACR plan: just park the Abrams tank outside and secure the perimeter of the house, making sure no one gets on or off the property. Then, Ian's team will go in on foot, raid the house and, if it's a mistake, at least you haven't destroyed anything. Ian wins this argument, but that's not the end of the dispute.Ian: the tank commander gave the order during the mission brief that anyone who ran off the objective was to be shot and I said “no, that's, we shouldn't have that as a criteria because you don't know why they're running off or they're not armed. You just got to run him down. Give me a good reason why we would shoot him,” and we had a verbal altercation and eventually he actually won.Barry: luckily, no one ended up running on or off the objectives as they carried out their raids. This key moment of conflict between Ian and the 3rd ACR commander would reappear.Ian: The 3rd ACR in particular struck me as a unit that was just not ready for counterinsurgency at all. They were ready to meet the Soviet Union in the Fulda Gap basically, is what they were ready to do.Barry: so I had to look this one up; the Fulda Gap was a strategically important path connecting eastern and western Europe. Okay, back to Ian.Ian: and that their whole culture, mentality, the way they thought, was about destroying as much as you can as fast as possible. The concept of trying to minimize damage and be precise just wasn't really in their mindset.Barry: the way Ian saw it, you're already uncertain if you have the right target, so why not take on more risk yourself and minimize risk of harmed innocent people? Even if you got the right target, why would you need to exert more violence than you need to accomplish your goals?Ian: it's really frustrating; it was frustrating on so many levels. On one level, it was frustrating because you'd see the harm that it caused and it was unnecessary, and I use “unnecessary” in a pretty loose way; it was negligent. It was negligent, was the way I would put it. So that was frustrating. The other thing that was frustrating was commanders would make it sound like we were doing a great job and accomplishing great things. If you were at the speech by my battalion commander when we left you’d thought we'd saved the world. The truth was that area was a mess when we left.Barry: over a decade later, that area is still a mess. Al-Qa’im today is an Isis stronghold. A recent Iraqi bombing of Isis militants in Al-Qa’im left another hundred civilians killed; this was in December of 2016. You're listening to Hi-Phi Nation, a philosophy podcast that turns stories into ideas. I'm Barry Lam. This week, we hear about moral conflicts in war. What happens when something bothers a soldier morally in a war? How much are they willing to stand up for their moral convictions and is it even fair to ask soldiers to make the kinds of decisions they have to make in fighting unconventional wars like in Iraq and Afghanistan? Any tactics that politicians call for in a war, like torture; they don't have to implement them. Soldiers do. And soldiers have to be the ones who live with their decisions. This is part one of two about the philosophy of war, and we'll hear from a remarkable group of veterans. They’re part from the first generation in decades of soldiers returning from a prolonged American war, now training to be philosophers. Stay tuned. Just one year behind Ian in the 82nd Airborne was a young soldier named Mike Robillard. I met him down at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.Mike: I'm Michael Robillard. I'm currently a Stockdale Center research fellow, as well as a University of Connecticut graduate student, PhD candidate, and, prior to my time doing this, I was a former officer in the US Army with the 82nd Airborne Division. So, I was 17 when I joined the military. I needed a parental waiver to get in. I remember going to my guidance counselor and she said, “you should apply to the Ivies; what do your parents do?” And I said, “well, my dad drives forklift and my mom, you know, she works odd jobs.” And so, like, “oh, well there's these things called the service academies that they're like an Ivy, but it's a free, the term “free ride” it kept kind of coming up. Five years five years of that service as an officer. I have a younger sister, I was thinking that this could be a really good thing, I don't want to bury my parents financially. There's also, I think, a lot of a desire to live up to maybe sort of traditional masculine roles.Barry: after West Point, Mike fulfills his first dream and becomes an Army Ranger. At this point, the US was gearing up for war in Iraq.Mike: So I wanted to deploy. It's not like I was thirsting to go to combat for combat’s sake; this is something that I've been training for, this is an identity or a role that I've assumed. Soldiers often take on a very paradoxical headspace because, unlike other professions, they never really get the opportunity to realize their craft or to vindicate their identity that they've been training so much for. Doctors are going to have to treat some illness, lawyers deal with something related to legality, police officers are gonna face criminals, but soldiers, you know, they can end up training an entire career waiting for a day that that might never arrive. So when the opportunity does sort of present itself, there is sort of a natural tendency to say, “well I trained for this, damnit; put me in. I can do this. I want to make the sacrifice.”Barry: Mike deploys in the 82nd Airborne as a second lieutenant. He does a lot of things small units do: traffic control points, enforcing curfews, guarding important sites like power plants and water distribution centers. He told me a story of letting a white car go by a traffic control point. Minutes later, someone with a white car shoots a rocket-propelled grenade at his entire squad, who had taken up a position on a rooftop. Mike and his unit locked down the area and searched every white car. One of them has a window blown out. They opened the trunk and find the RPG launcher. Apparently, the back blast from the launcher destroyed the windows of the car. There were third-degree burns all over the driver and passenger.Mike: They said that they were given a hundred dollars or whatever the equivalent is in Iraqi dinar by the local cleric to just come shoot at us. So they're just poor, so, “we don't have anything against you, we’re just poor; we need money.”Barry: Robillard’s philosophical work today arises directly out of his own military experiences. It came out of his thinking as a young lieutenant in the midst of the Iraq war, a war that, at the time, he thought was unjust. What was a soldier supposed to do in the middle of a war they deemed unjust? He and a fellow West Point alum gave a presentation at a joint services conference in 2006.Mike: when we presented that, that sort of polarized the room. To present it in uniform and I don't know that would have got us in trouble in some circles or not, but half the room hated us, half the room loved us. The Canadians, especially in the foreign officers, really loved us. Barry: in the presentation, Robillard said something I found interesting; he said, that as a lieutenant in addition to leading and protecting his soldiers from physical harms, he had to ensure the ethical welfare of his soldiers. I asked him what he meant by “ethical welfare.” Mike: I think we were thinking something along the lines of, if you were a leader, then when you lead people into certain contexts, you're pulling them into this context where they're trusting you to to have done due diligence ahead of time to make sure that what they're going to do once they hit that context is most ethical.Barry: to a young lieutenant Robillard, he sought as a military leader’s job, to protect his soldiers from moral harms, or the harm you do to yourself when you do something unethical. The idea that someone doing an immoral action is, in fact, doing himself a great harm is a very old idea in Western philosophy. It goes all the way back to Plato in a dialogue that West Point cadets study: the Crito. In the Crito, Socrates argues that doing harm to others is a way of corrupting your own soul and that corrupting your own soul is the deepest harm you can inflict on yourself. This idea that there is something called moral injury is receiving a lot of attention in recent years, as psychologists psychiatrists, and philosophers have found it a very apt description of the trauma that many of today's soldiers face coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. A moral injury is an injury to a person's conscience resulting from that person's perception or infliction of a deep moral wrong, or when that person is put in the situation where they must make a profound moral decision. Moral injuries often result in moral residue, which is damage to the conscience that a person carries with them for life. It is this moral injury that a young lieutenant Mike Robillard was worried about when he started to question the justice of the Iraq war. He was worried that the injustice of the war was forcing him to put his men in a position of injuring their souls.Mike: we do owe it to soldiers that we don't put them in contexts where there is an unneeded risk of moral injury. I mean, sometimes it's endemic to war, but if we can mitigate it, then we ought to. Barry: this brings us to Mike Robillard’s philosophical work, on something he's calling “moral exploitation.” He believes that a lot of young soldiers are being exploited, but it isn't the usual kind of exploitation. To Robillard, exploitation requires two things: you need an exploiter, who is a person or group who is in some advantageous position; you need an exploitee, the person being exploited. The exploitee needs to be in a vulnerable position. It could be different kinds of vulnerability: being a child, being poor, or otherwise powerless. For the exploitation to occur, the exploiter takes advantage of that vulnerability to garner an excessive or unfair benefit from the exploitee. The usual cases we’re familiar with are migrant labor, sweatshop labor, sex workers, and in certain parts of the world, very needy people who sell their kidneys in order to feed themselves or their families. notice first that all of these cases can very much involve consent, as we usually understand that term. There's another similarity that all of these cases have.Mike: the currency of exploitation, the thing that is being unfairly distributed or moved between exploitee and exploiter often has been cashed out in terms of some type of physical good or service.Barry: Robillard believes, however, that there's something else besides a physical good or physical labor that exploiters can exploit.Mike: the young au pair, the novice au pair who goes and becomes an au pair for a particular family of wealth; assume that they're coming from a very vulnerable background, that this is their best economic option, in addition to the physical duress that might accompany taking care of a child. What they're also doing is they're taking on a huge deliberative role and more responsibility of raising a child, and these are huge moral decisions that are sort of just being thrust upon this person in addition to the physical services that they’re providing.Barry: Robillard calls this moral exploitation: what an exploiter wants to do is offload moral decision-making, decision-making that tests your moral principle, that test your sense of self and character, onto someone else so they don't have any of those decisions on their own conscience. As another example, think about young rookie cops who are given an assignment to flood patrol in the most dangerous neighborhoods. These cops have a vulnerability in their departments. They have very little power over their assignments and their senior management are taking advantage of this vulnerability. But it isn't just labor or risk of harm that's being exploited here; these rookie cops are going to be placed in situations where they have to make momentous decisions between who's a suspect and who isn’t; whether to kill, harm, arrest or leave alone; and whether to risk their own safety or risk unjustly harming innocent people. These are the decisions the more powerful cops just don't want to make and that's the reason to offload it to the more vulnerable.Mike: so when we pay cops or prison guards to take on that job, we're not just paying for them to do something physical; we're also thrusting an entire set of difficult moral decisions, moral delivery of roles, and instances of moral risk of failure onto these people in that come part and parcel with the actual job. And I think that where this is most pronounced is in the case of soldiers, in virtue of the institutional structure that is the military. So in addition to the set of ways in which soldiers are often exploited, and I think that we can look to many classic examples of this, this famous Lenin line that a “bayonet is a tool with two workers at each end,” you know, it's not a surprise to anyone that soldiers are often recruited from lower socioeconomic classes or that they're recruited from a very young age or that they have pronounced epistemic vulnerabilities. And I think that what is missing in a full account of the exploitation of soldiers is that in addition to these physical services and physical risks, there's also these tremendous moral responsibilities and moral burdens that come with the the act of being a soldier and, in a sense, these are just dirty hands-types of questions and decisions and actions that society doesn't want to deal with. So, it effectively gets outsourced or offloaded onto a rather vulnerable set of persons. So the disenfranchised of society, not only do they have to take on these fiscal burdens, they also get stuck absorbing the lion's share of moral residue and the dirty hands. “We don’t have anything against you, we're just poor. We need money.”Barry: we know that American soldiers nowadays typically come from economically vulnerable classes. That was certainly the case with Mike Robillard. But Robillard thinks there are other kinds of vulnerability in addition to economic vulnerability. Young American kids, especially working class males, are particularly vulnerable to appeals to their masculinity, their patriotism, their nationalism, and their civic duty. And they aren't of an age where they know or have the capacity to fully understand what these things mean.Mike: admittedly I think I was probably swept up in this, personally. But I think that at a young age, especially ages 16, 17, 18, when a lot of these kids are making these decisions to enter into the military, their sense of moral commitment, their sense of patriotism, it's, through no fault of their own, it's not a robust sense of civic duty or of nationalism and I think that the recruitment pitch that the the military has standardly went with and presently goes with really leans into and takes advantage of that idealistic kind of naive senses of duty to one's country. There's the sense that, I think, can be instilled in young people that these people gave so much in the past so that you can have all these things that you take for granted. Suddenly, there's the sense of tremendous almost unpayable debt to the country or to the persons of the past that made the ultimate sacrifice so you can go to college or whatever. Those moral commitments can serve very often as a source of vulnerability towards exploitation.Barry: of course, there's nothing wrong with a sense of patriotism or civic duty; these can be very good things. A naive sense of duty to country, having no idea about the different ways you can express your patriotism or your duty to past generation or your duty to the rest of society; that's what Mike Robillard thinks makes young people particularly vulnerable to moral exploitation, and the most troubling feature of moral exploitation is that the people most vulnerable to serious moral injury are the people who are likeliest to face it.Rumsfeld: at Abu Gorab, where Americans were mistreating, abusing in a sadistic, disgusting manner, people that were in our custody and should have been treated properly and the President had said should be treated humanely and I had said should be treated humanely.Myers: clearly, we don't torture detainees. That’s not in anybody’s playbook. That's not what we do as Americans. It’s not in accordance with the law and conventions that we simply won't condone it, if it’s true. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job of policing ourselves to-date. Bush: yeah, we certainly wish Abu Gorab hadn't happened, but that should not reflect, you know, America; this is the actions of some soldiers. “Some soldiers.” Rumsfeld: they were just doing things they shouldn't have been done and they've been punished for them, as they should be.Ian: I remember when I went and talked to the jack from 82nd. We talked about the deployment. He talked about how he went to talk to some soldiers of the battalion; they had basically built a little interrogation chair to make detainees really uncomfortable. The most uncharitable way to look at this is as a torture device, really. And the Jag, I said, “well does that cross the line?” and he said, “well, I sat in the chair and I didn't think it was that bad, so I’d say…” This is a completely subjective basis and, furthermore, you're sitting in that chair for a short period of time, doesn't necessarily provide a very accurate window about how they're using the chair when they get a detainee. I can't use your guidance that you just gave me to make a decision and I'm a reasonably well-educated West Point graduate who's got a lot of training on the ethics and the law of war. How do you expect a specialist or a private to make those types of decisions? That's utterly ridiculous and unfair.Barry: you’re listening to Hi-Phi Nation, a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas. I’m Barry Lam. Today’s show: soldier philosophers. That’s Major Ian Fishback, again. Between his second and third deployment, as he was training to be a green beret, Fishback engaged in a one-man research project within the army. He observed some detainee abuse himself and he saw the pictures from Abu Gorab and he wanted to know what official army policy was with regard to detention and interrogation. Junior soldiers were being punished, but punished for what? What policy were they supposedly violating? When Mike Robillard was talking about moral exploitation, he mostly described it as a relationship between society and its soldiers. Most members of the society don't want to get their hands dirty and are happy to have others do morally dirty jobs for them, but there's a more insidious kind of moral exploitation, one that happens within the military between commanders and junior soldiers and it's not just keep your hands clean; it's to blame others for getting their hands dirty.26:51Ian: one of the things that happened was after 9/11, there was a deliberate decision to try to use techniques from SERE school, which is a school for US service members at high risk of capture to go through to learn how to resist interrogations and how to survive prisoner war status. They took the interrogation techniques from that school which were, they're not even really interrogation techniques, for one thing; they're mainly designed to get propaganda etc., but they were the techniques that the Soviets would use in their gulags, basically. So, they took these techniques that weren't even primarily interrogation techniques and tried to use them against the detainees we caught in the war on terror and they tried to control that so that they were used but weren't abused, which most professionals said, “that's probably not going to happen; it's probably going to be the case that this is going to spread and you're going to have rampant abuse and really bad abuse.” Then later on, those are the techniques that were used in Abu Gorab. So, when I look at the pictures from Abu Gorab, when they first came out, a lot of the pictures didn't strike me as anomalous with US policy. Some of them were: sodomy with chem light definitely was. But stripping a detainee naked, having them getting a pyramid, chaining them to the bed, making them get in weird positions; ninety percent of those pictures were what was expected according to US policy. My impression, and I think this is accurate, was that the generals and the politicians who were responsible for that policy did not clearly explain where the soldiers had perhaps done something that they weren't supposed to do and where they were doing something that was clearly in accord with US policy. Barry: officers are trained to follow the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Conventions state that civilian detainees, wounded or sick soldiers, and surrendered POWs must be treated humanely, cannot be attacked, and must be provided necessary medical care.Ian: I did not think we were in accord with the Geneva Conventions because I thought we were very pretty open about not applying the Geneva Conventions to the detainees. The President made statements to that effect and then the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld got up and testified that we were following the Geneva Conventions and that's when I said, “no, we're not; we're not following the Geneva Conventions. Like, I don't know what we're doing, but it's not that.”Barry: it was clear to Ian in his investigations that a lot of soldiers were implementing, not violating, US policy. But the soldiers were charged with violating something. Was it because these techniques were reserved for interrogation and they were used on detainees without interrogational purposes? Or was it because they went above and beyond the SERE tactics?Ian: my concern was that these soldiers are being scapegoated and that we weren't being honest to Congress. It wasn't just a problem that we weren't following the Geneva Conventions; it was a problem that there was no clear standard to replace the Geneva Conventions and you had this background of SERE techniques that was infiltrating the human intelligence apparatus. So people were, people were just basically making their own stuff up.Barry: Ian took his concerns up his chain of command. He faced either ignorance or disagreement. Some just didn't know what the standards were that junior soldiers had violated. Others thought that there were clear standards, but their version of clear standards were some subjective judgment about how bad some particular interrogation device was. Eventually, he went to his congressional representative, who said that the administration was being honest and that he shouldn't be worried. At this point, whether there was some clear standard internal to the army was just one of the disagreements Ian had with his superiors. The other disagreement was whether abuse and torture were wrong and this, of course, cut an even deeper fissure between Ian and those around him.Ian: when I was at the advanced course, which is part of formal schooling for all military officers, we had a small group in Special Forces; it was all Special Forces guys, I think there were maybe fifteen of us. The instructor was Special Forces, and we watched the movie The Battle of Algiers. It's about the French counterinsurgency in Algeria and they used torture; they used torture to try to break the network and the instructor was very open about if you want to destroy these networks, this is what you need to do. It was very clear; there was no ambiguity about what was going on. He was being very clear that you had to institute some kind of harsh interrogation techniques and there's no doubt that what the French did was torture. Beyond the pale. And I had a different lesson from The Battle of Algiers, which was: the French lost and they lost in no small part because they carried out these types of policies and we held different opinions about this, the small group instructor and I. We were united in our agreement that whatever the standard was, it should be pretty clear so soldiers don't get scapegoated for doing something that left completely vague and open-ended and encouraged to do certain kinds of violence to detainees and then when they step over this line that they don't even know what the line is, they get held to account.Barry: once Ian realized that nothing was going to happen inside of the army, he breaks with the chain of command. He writes a letter to John McCain outlining his concerns. The public, at this point, have already seen the Abu Gorab photos, but still believe that it was a matter of bad apples. Ian's letter circulates around Capitol Hill and eventually, word gets back to the army that one of their officers is speaking to Congress. Ian gets called out of Special Forces training by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command or CID. They questioned him for a whole day, saying that if you witnessed abuses, that he should name names. He refuses because it looked to him that they were trying to scapegoat again. At this point, he gets an appointment to talk with people on Capitol Hill, including John McCain. The appointment is not for a while, so he gets to go back to Special Forces training.Ian: as I was getting ready to leave for that phase of my training which is supposed to take about a month and I was supposed to be ex-communicado, I wasn’t supposed to be able to talk to anyone, my fellow student who was the acting team sergeant, I was acting team leader of this training detachment, my team sergeant called me and said, “I don't know what's going on, but the non-commissioned officer trainer in charge of us said that you're for sure not going to make it through.” He said, “I don't think that's appropriate and I don't know what's going on, but I thought you should know and I wanted to warn you.” That was related to what was going on with my interactions with the Congress people.Barry: was this a threat? Or was it just a prediction? Ian told some people about it in Congress that he was in contact with. That same day, his letter to McCain gets leaked to the media.Ian: and it's plausible that the release of my story to the media was to protect me in some way. That's my best explanation. Honestly, I don't know what exactly happened.Barry: after Ian's letter was leaked to the press, things move quickly. He becomes a national story. John McCain adds an amendment to a defense spending bill in December, 2005, outlawing cruel, inhumane and humiliating treatment of US-held detainees. He cites Captain Ian Fishback on the Senate floor. The amendment passes ninety to nine in the Senate. Ian is named as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2005. He finishes Special Forces training and served two more combat tours in Iraq, more on that later. I asked Ian about the fallout for him inside of the army.Ian: there are a lot of folks who disagreed with what I did and I don't think they understood why I did it, for one thing. But regardless, they really disapproved of it and they wanted me out of Special Forces, maybe out of the army; they wanted me to be punished. It wasn't everyone, but it was enough people that everywhere I went, I would encounter it and when I encountered it, it was almost impossible to reverse. So imagine that you have ten people working with you. You're expected to be the leader and two of them are deadset at undermining everything you do. It's just so frustrating and at the beginning, I managed it okay, I probably could have managed it better, but over time, those repeated interactions made it harder and harder for me to function in the organization and honestly, I think they had a negative effect on me as a person just because I became very, very mistrustful of people around me and it was warranted. But, it still wasn't the type of person I wanted to be.Barry: it's been ten years now since all of this happened to Ian. I asked him to reflect as a philosopher on what he thought about the whole affair; why he thought the Bush administration and the senior military command acted the way they did.Ian: one thing is they wanted to punish someone; I think that's true. But I also think they thought that it would work. I think it was just desperation. One thing that's really amazing to me is among military commanders, if a commander is faced with a dangerous and stressful situation, and the commander just spazzes out, that's bad. But amongst our politicians, we almost expect them to do it. So, if a politician gets up after 9/11 and says, “everyone calm down, here's what we need to do,” that might be received well, but when Bush, which basically what he did was overreact and just start reaching for whatever’s available, rather than making a systematic, informed decision about what might be a good decision, people tend to be very forgiving about that. It's really bizarre to me. When we think about what it means to be a military professional and we look at the torture policy that was carried out after September 11th, it's the most unprofessional shenanigans that one could almost conceive of. People just start reaching in the file drawer for whatever they think will work. They start implementing policies that were designed for a Soviet gulag primarily to induce confessions, not to get interrogational intelligence, and then out of sheer desperation, they start spreading that through the organization, and then after the fact, when it becomes obvious that, oh, look this turned out just as badly as the professional, the people that actually knew what they were talking about predicted, they shunt all the blame off onto low-ranking soldiers and then they try to justify themselves about providing any proof. When I look at the aspect of the torture policy that bothers me the most, I'm not even sure that it's the moral aspect, although it does morally bother me, it's the sheer and utter incompetence of the leaders of the United States military and our political leaders that just blows me away. It's sad.Barry: since I last spoke to Ian, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States and vowed to return to the Bush-era torture policies. Neither the new Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, or a Secretary of Homeland Security, General John Kelly, agree with that change in policy. Both of them served as Marine Commanders during the Iraq war. You're listening to Hi-Phi Nation. I'm Barry Lam. Ian Fishback proposed one kind of solution to the problem of moral exploitation. He wanted leaders to draw sharp, red lines between what you can do and can't do, making it so that soldiers didn't have to make a moral decision about how to carry out a detention. He wanted leaders to take complete responsibility for those guidelines and for command failures to implement those guidelines. But the more general problem of moral exploitation is not just within the army; it's between the government and its soldiers, and between society and its soldiers. I asked Mike Robillard about how he thinks we can minimize moral exploitation.Mike: first thought is that the content of the military pitch to young recruits needs to be revised. I think there's plenty of young recruits that, they're not under any illusion that they might go to war and they might die or they might lose a limb or eyesight. I don't think that they're confused about that, but what I think is missing during the recruitment pitch is someone saying, “look, you might leave the wire and have to deal with some really crazy triage scenario where you have a limited amount of medical resources and you have to distribute it between your own men and civilians.” That's not part of the content of the pitch.Barry: letting soldiers know that tough moral decisions are part of the job is a start, but Mike Robillard and a lot of these guys from service academies in ROTC already take classes on moral decision-making, and they still don't feel prepared to take on the moral burden. What else is needed?Mike: the state, at least in principle, does recognize that age factors into moral decision-making, with everything from drinking to marriage to sex, some of the most recent evidence in neuroscience suggests that the prefrontal cortex doesn't fully mature until age twenty-five. Ironically, age twenty-five is when the Selective Service time period cuts off.Barry: raising the age of enlistment to twenty-five and changing the pitch might help prevent some cases of moral exploitation, but it's not going to get rid of the problem, and if you can't get rid of the problem, you might want to distribute the problem more fairly and equitably.Mike: I don't think it needs to be the case that, in order to discharge their duty to soldiers, that everyone become a soldier, but maybe something like a war tax or a draft might be another institutional way in which the moral risk might be more equitably apportioned. Furthermore, if we did so, you would think that you might have a much more politically engaged populace that actually has a stake in going to war.Barry: instituting a draft would not only more equitably distribute the risk of moral injury; it would also solve the problem that many people have with Robillard’s solutions. They think these policies would end up undermining recruitment efforts and undermine enlistment to fighting wars. It's a very recent development in the history of US wars that there hasn't been a draft. The discomfort we civilians have at a draft, which for Robillard means for people twenty-five and over, is probably completely selfish. We have jobs, families, and goals in life; all the more reason for us to offload military service on young people who don't have these things. ................
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