倾听冲突：人类的战争体验

BRIAN MATEO: Hello, everyone. My name is Brian Mateo, and I serve as director of education and special projects at Carnegie Council. To begin, I would like to welcome you all to today’s event in the Council’s Ethics Empowered: Leadership in Practice series, which convenes scholars and practitioners to discuss pressing moral issues, reflect on their careers, and offer insights to young leaders.

In today’s panel we will be exploring what has been lost in ethical thinking about war as it moves further away from human experience. Given the rise of new technologies and autonomous weapons, how can we ensure that our moral frameworks adapt to recenter the voice of the soldiers, veterans, and civilian victims of armed conflict?

It is my pleasure to now introduce our moderator for this event, Adam Read-Brown, executive editor and director of journal programming at Carnegie Council. We are also honored to welcome our panelists, Shannon E. French, professor of philosophy and law, Case Western Reserve University; and Cian O’Driscoll, professor and head of Department for International Relations at Coral Bell School, Australian National University (ANU).

Before I pass the microphone to Adam, I would like to remind you that toward the end of the program we will have a brief Q&A with the speakers. Please submit your questions to our panelists directly via the chat feature. Following today’s convening, our team will publish the full event as a video, podcast, and transcript alongside additional educational resources and discussion questions that can be leveraged in the classroom.

As I join you from the Council’s Global Ethics Hub in New York City, I want to welcome you again and will now pass the program over to Adam.

ADAM READ-BROWN: Thanks, Brian, and thanks to Cian and Shannon for joining us. It is a real honor to be here with both of you today to tackle these important questions. Thank you to the audience for joining us as well. As Brian mentioned, there is a chat function, where I would encourage you to submit questions for our panelists, and I will make sure to save some time toward the end of our discussion to bring those questions in.

Earlier this year, the Carnegie Council’s journal, Ethics & International Affairs, published a collection of articles spearheaded by Cian O’Driscoll that focused on the relationship between the ethics of war and the experience of war. This collection in large part served as the inspiration for convening today’s event.

At the heart of that collection and the driving consideration for our conversation today is a worry that there is a disconnect between the theorizing of the ethics of war and the actual lived experience of war and that this disconnect may negatively impact the decision-making of warfighters, policymaking in war, and may lead us to miss key aspects of the civilian experience of warfare. I will also note that the journal is now fully open-access, so I would encourage all of you to take advantage of that and engage with this excellent collection following our discussion.

As we look around the globe today there are multiple ongoing conflicts in which we can see how technology is transforming the way wars are fought at an ever-accelerating rate, the rapid evolution of drone technology in the war in Ukraine including recent artificial intelligence (AI) targeting and deployment and AI-enabled targeting systems in Israel’s campaign in Gaza. These are just a few examples among many that we might touch on, but the picture starts to become clear: The shape and pace of warfare are changing, and that means that the experience both of warfighters and civilians affected by war is changing as well.

One of the big questions then, certainly from the perspective of a place like Carnegie Council, is whether and how those changes do or should affect how we conceive of the ethics of war as we consider things like proportionality, distinction, and accountability, and how do we ensure that these considerations do not just remain relegated to the ivory tower. With that bit of framing, I would like to turn to our esteemed panelists, who will answer all these questions and more.

I would like us to start with the experience side of things. I am going to kick it over to you first, Shannon, but this will be a question for both of you: Could you begin by telling us how, in your view, warfighting has evolved in recent years, particularly with the rise of emerging technologies? How does the experience of warfare today look markedly different than it did even 20 years ago? What are some of the tradeoffs that military officials and soldiers need to contend with today that are distinct to modern warfare?

SHANNON FRENCH: First of all, thank you for having me and thank you for that wonderful introduction, Brian, and that excellent framing, Adam. This is such an important topic, and I am delighted to be here with my friend and colleague Cian to talk about these important issues.

First of all, one thing I want to highlight is that as we look at the changes, and there absolutely have been incredibly important changes, we also need to recognize the degree to which some things stay the same. The reason I point that out is that there was a mistake made by people who do the kind of work that we do when drone warfare first came on the scene. An assumption was fairly popular at the time that the operators of drone systems would in effect see them like a videogame and that they would not be as affected as you would imagine others to be who have to take lives, as we know others who take lives have to be.

In reality, what actually happened was that these drone operators were asked to follow individuals the way a sniper or someone hunting someone might follow them, day after day, and it became difficult for them to sufficiently distance themselves from those individuals in the way that protects you a little bit from the effects of the killing that you are ultimately asked to do, and we saw spiking levels of posttraumatic stress amongst some of those drone operators. That is a case where we misjudged initially how this new technology would affect people, and seeing people day after day in very high-pixelated ways and then being asked to kill them is a very difficult experience, not to minimize obviously the victim at the other end, but focusing for a moment on that experience.

In the same way, we have this recent case in the United States of the USS Lincoln, which was deployed for an incredibly long period of time, and during that time everything was happening at the same rapid pace of technology and people were somewhat aware of that and somewhat disconnected from it, and that can also cause different harms psychologically and so forth.

Last but not least, I want to emphasize that unfortunately what we see with some of the new technology is what we originally thought drone warfare would do, and that is the ability to separate the human decision maker from the moral weight of what they are doing. That is what worries me the most. By that, I am talking about systems where a large part of the decision making is somehow passed over to computerized systems that we trust more than we should without necessarily enough humans in the loop double-checking things, and this can lead to crimes and tragedies, and we have certainly seen that, including the horrific deaths of the schoolchildren who were killed in Iran.

ADAM READ-BROWN: Thanks, Shannon. That is a helpful way to get us started.

Cian, would you like to add any thoughts on your view of the changing face of warfare, or, as Shannon pointed us toward, some of the throughlines we might overlook with all the fancy new technology?

CIAN O’DRISCOLL: Thanks so much, Adam, and greetings from unseated Ngunnawal in Ngambri lands. I will open my remarks by paying my respects to elders past and present and also by thanking you, Adam, Brian, and Shannon for the invitation to be part of this event, which I am going to call this evening’s event in Australia. It is nice to be here. I have always enjoyed these events myself, so it is lovely to have an opportunity to take part in one.

There are two points I would like to make on this particular question. The first is that setting it in a broader frame seldom conforms to the classic image we might have of it in that it rarely has a clean beginning, middle, and end, and even more rarely culminates in the kind of climactic, decisive battle that you might associate with the classic wars of military history or Hollywood movies. Yet a lot of contemporary just war theory still assumes this outmoded conception of war, and I think the challenge arising from this for us is to make sure that we continually update our understanding of what we might call the “war” in just war theory.

The second point I want to make I owe to the terrific community of military ethics scholars I work with in Canberra, where there is quite a population density of us, but specifically to Toni Erskine and Neil Renic, and their work highlights how today’s soldiers and officers are embedded within and operate as part of wider systems, which often incorporate autonomous and AI elements. This means that what John Keegan once called “the human face of war” is only part of the story today, and I think that introduces a very significant wrinkle when we attempt to think ethically about war. This is perhaps an issue that we might tug on over the coming discussion.

ADAM READ-BROWN: Thanks, Cian. I framed this question as the changing face of warfighting, and I wonder if, before we move into some of the ethics questions, which you have both now alluded to, we can pause for a moment and look at the flip side of that, the changing experience for civilians in warfare, pulling at whether these technologies are really shifting what it means to be a civilian caught in conflict, or is it more about the consistent tragedy of warfare over time?

SHANNON FRENCH: One of the things I think is relatively new and disturbing is the sense that you, as a civilian, could be confronted with enemies who are not themselves in peril directly. We overarchingly just call this “distance warfare,” and in some ways it is not new in the sense that it was revolutionary when you could suddenly kill people with a crossbow, particularly when a foot soldier could kill a knight, which was very upsetting to the powers that be, or before that, the longbow. You could go on and on about other distance weapons, but when you start talking about distance weapons that are unmanned, then there is this new sense of, “Wow, you can kill me from a distance, and none of you are here.” It is not just that some of the assets are distance assets, but you could imagine experiences where—well, we don’t have to imagine, sadly, we have accounts of people at the receiving end of this feeling a different kind of despair in this situation.

I have heard and read accounts of civilians talking about the incessant buzz of drones circling an area, and if you imagine the unending stress of knowing that that is there and that any point this thing you cannot reach and does not have a human in it, that you cannot appeal to in any way, is potentially going to kill you.

The flip side, since we are talking about what the throughlines are, is again that still, right now at least, in many cases there is a human somewhere in that decision chain. I am certainly one who advocates wherever I can to keeping it that way, but I worry that there is so much pressure to get away from humans who can make a last-minute call.

One of the friends I used to work with when I taught at the U.S. Naval Academy, Bob Proano, used to talk about how when he was a pilot his commander always said: “Here’s the mission briefing, unless it doesn’t look right,” and it kind of drove him crazy, but later he would say that was the best commander he ever had because he was someone who recognized that he, the pilot, was going to be the one who was actually going to be close enough to see if something had changed, if a school bus had entered the frame or something else, and could make that judgment call. We take humans out of that, and I am very concerned.

I noticed that President Zelenskyy at the United Nations made a comment that he believes pretty soon there will be completely un-human-aided decision making occurring, and he said that he hopes peace comes before that.

CIAN O’DRISCOLL: I mentioned a moment ago that the challenge for us is to make sure we continually update our understanding of the war in just war theory, and in some ways the follow-on from that for me is what this might entail. On the one hand, it might involve the kind of work that people like Daniel Brunstetter and Christian Braun have done on the use of force short of war, or what they call jus ad vim and this might be packaged broadly as ethical work that aims to be responsive to the changing form that the use of armed force takes. I find their work fascinating insofar as the questions they ask are prompted by the empiric realities on the ground. That is one fascinating thread.

On the other hand, and I guess this is what I am trying to do in my own research and it might prompt us to dig even further into what war comprises today by both centering and interrogating the experiences of the people who wage it and who have it waged against them.

I focus in my work and in some of the essays you mentioned in the journal, Adam, on the experience of soldiers and combatants, but there is equally fantastic and fascinating work done by Shannon’s dear colleague, Jessica Wolfendale, among others, but also by writers like Viet Thanh Nguyen, which aim to center noncombatants in the experience of war and to rethink the rights and wrongs of war through the eyes of those who are caught in the crossfire, as it were, and I think some of that work is valuable and challenging because it flips the script on the ethics of war.

The ethics of war is typically addressed to the agent who is exercising power, to the person holding the gun. It does not speak to, about, or of the person who is having the gun pointed at them, so I find that way of proceeding really fascinating.

More broadly, there is a quirk here for ethics of war scholars. This approach may be more familiar than it might initially seem. If one of the key aspects of Michael Walzer’s classic book Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations is his attempt to ground the ethics of war and the experience of war—and it is if you read the various prefaces to the book, this is a point he drills down on—this is one of the very few elements of this book that has not been subsequently developed by other scholars, at least not in any systematic manner. Almost every aspect of Just and Unjust Wars has been raked over by scholars in the decades since it was published, but one of the core elements of it, this attempt to ground ethics in experience, has been curiously overlooked.

I suppose what I am looking to do and what I find interesting here is that there is a suggestion of going back to Walzer as a “back to the future” in terms of how we think about the relation between the ethics of war and the experience of war.

ADAM READ-BROWN: That is great, Cian, and it gets us right into the heart of some of these questions about the shifting relationship between the ethics of war theorizing, and the experience of war. You have mentioned your own work and the work you did for the journal. I might push you a little to expand on some of the work you are doing to try to bring those voices in your work closer to the ethics of war.

I won’t be coy here. You have been working on a project where you talk about the way we can use war memoirs and the experiences of soldiers. I would love to hear you give us a little on what you feel like that can add to the discussion of the ethics of war.

CIAN O’DRISCOLL: One of the ways people often frame this to me or assume it is they ask me in what ways are the ethics of war in tension with the experience of war and how does or should one inform the other. The way I sometimes respond to that is by saying it is perhaps not so much that they are in tension as that the experience of war illuminates what I see as the very real difficulties of thinking and acting ethically in war, difficulties that the ethics of war literature is prone to gloss over.

What I mean by this is quite simple. I think there is a certain rationalism baked into the ethics of war discourse, by which I mean there is an assumption that we can reason our way to first, an understanding of what counts as ethical conduct in war, and second, to then enacting that understanding. By attending to the experience of war I think we complicate that picture.

We learn, for instance, that soldiers do not always have the level of detachment or the wider perspective necessary to reason their way to what we might deem the right answers with any kind of reliability. We also learn, it follows, that thinking and acting ethically in war is even more vexed and even more maddeningly difficult for the soldier who is in the thick of it than the ethics of war scholars might realize or care to admit from the comfort of their proverbial armchairs.

I think it is worth drawing this out because it obliges us to look beyond the glib, self-contained tenets of just war analysis to truly grapple with what they actually mean and what it entails for the military personnel or civilians tasked to live, die, and sometimes also kill by these tenets. I think bringing experience into the picture, to paraphrase John Howard Yoder, is a way for me of “being honest” in just war thinking. I would argue I suppose that some awareness of the experience of war is necessary to ground our understanding of the ethics of war, which is vital if we want our just war theory to be action-guiding.

You mentioned memoirs in your remarks. War memoirs come into this for me so far as they are a window onto the experience of soldiers. They are notoriously unreliable and quite a curious type of source to work with, but they are a fascinating one also insofar as memoirs often encompass and toggle between very different authorial perspectives in that sometimes the author drops you right into the middle of the action and obliges you almost to see it up close and personal and in the next paragraph they zoom back out and bring in the benefit of hindsight or all the years of reflection that have passed since the event happened to them. So you get this real experience near/experience far dynamic, which allows the author I think to sometimes articulate some of the tensions and difficulties of making decisions that you have to make in the moment and be true to in the moment but that you are also aware you have to live with and be judged by others who were not there and in years to come. That is I suppose where I am trying to go with this. I hope that is somewhat clear.

ADAM READ-BROWN: I think that brings a unique perspective into this discussion as we try to draw directly on those experiences.

Shannon, you mentioned earlier this notion of trust with changing technologies that got us into some of these ethical discussions and the shifting ground on which we find ourselves. I want to ask you with the changing experience how we should be thinking about whether we need to be thinking differently about ethics in war, whether this changes things, or whether there are more fundamental truths under there that continue with the throughline of the experience and ethics can continue to guide us in the way they did before.

SHANNON FRENCH: First, I want to thank Cian for the points he made and the work he is doing because it is very, very important, and this dialogue needs to continue.

I am reminded of the fact that when people think about looking backward to wars of the past, I think they do often—I don’t know if it is “rose-colored glasses” or how we want to frame it—tend to assume that notions like posttraumatic stress or the term that has become popular more recently sadly of “moral injury” is something new, and it absolutely is not.

One of the examples I like to give is surprising to some people, and that is that when we look back all the way to the Crusades, which is very problematic in a number of ways, you think of the European troops sent on the Crusades as potentially a group that had every reason to feel like whatever they were doing there was perfectly fine from an ethical basis. They were literally absolved in advance from what they were going to do.

Yet, if you look at the work of folks like Bernard Verkamp, you find out that some of the returning knights from those experiences became angry with the church of their time because the church kept trying to tell them effectively, “You should not feel guilty. You don’t have anything you need to do penance for.”

The knights were having to say, “Yes, but I feel guilty and don’t feel that I am right with God, and could you please help me with that?” It actually drove the church to create specific forms of penance and ultimate earned absolution for those who were feeling this way. Again, when you go further back, you get the vestal virgins in Rome performing some of those roles and ceremonies for the members of the Roman legions. In Native American culture you see rituals that were part of the transition back from war.

One thing I want to do is highlight the fact that the difficulty on the human level of taking other lives when, first, you can never be completely sure you are fighting in a just cause, you are having to take other people’s word for that in many ways, and then second, when, no matter what you do, there are going to be tragedies. People are going to be killed that you did not intend to kill and that you cannot fully justify. That is not a new concept, and to sometimes see it unfortunately brushed aside by various leaders as something newfangled, New Agey, or heaven knows what, is extremely frustrating.

I want to add to that the fact that everything is now recorded adds another element, the technology part of this, the fact that you could be forced to relive things in different ways than was available to those who fought in the past, is yet a new part of this. I always point people toward the amazing work of Jonathan Shay, who has worked on topics about moral injury for veterans for decades. His works, particularly his original books, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, and he has written more since, shone a light on the individual experience of the troops.

Last on this point I will say that I had the tremendous privilege of working for 11 years at the U.S. Naval Academy, and the friends that I made there included my now-former students and officers I taught next to. We just had the 25th anniversary of 9/11, which I experienced at the Naval Academy, and I am still talking to people from that era in my life who are still trying to understand and reconcile or recover from what they experienced and doing so in many varied ways. We cannot minimize any of this and we cannot see it as something new or temporary. This is part of human nature.

ADAM READ-BROWN: This gets us right where I wanted to push us next. We have this worry about this disconnect. There are ways that the experience of war might not line up with what we have in this handed-down just war doctrine as Cian was discussing, and, Shannon, you just mentioned your teaching. I know you worked for many years at the U.S. Naval Academy and now teach at Case Western where you direct a master’s program on military ethics and have current and future members of the military among your students.

The classroom presents an interesting example of how we can think about bridging the gap between experience and theory, and I am curious to hear about your experience and your approach when you are teaching future or current members of the armed forces about these ethical concepts, for whom these are not theoretical questions. These are going to be practical and applicable in their professional lives. What does that look like for you?

SHANNON FRENCH: One thing that I always try to do is direct discussions about the difficult decisions that have to be made, for example, in a combat context, in such a way that people who have not yet experienced it can try to genuinely reflect on what they might be tempted to do that would not match with their values. What I mean by that is, if you just ask someone who has never seen combat something blunt about the rules of war, like, “Would you ever shoot an unarmed prisoner of war,” you are going to get, “No, ma’am, of course not. Of course I would never.” That is useless. It is a good answer, but it is a reflexive answer.

What we need to do is actually give realistic-enough descriptions of situations they may find themselves in, as awful as this is, so they can genuinely imagine, Wait. What if I actually am tempted? What if we are talking about a situation where this person has been picking off members of my platoon over a period of time, I have finally cornered them, they surrender, and they look smug, and I am still reeling from holding the guts of some 19-year-old kid. I might want to shoot that person. How do I now figure out in that moment what would stop me?

It is not going to be some academic answer like, “What is going to stop me is my understanding of the laws of war.” No. “What is going to stop me is concern about reaction from the public.” None of that is going to be present enough.

As I have continuously argued with my Code of the Warrior work and so forth, the only thing that is going to stop you in that moment is if you have internalized fully a commitment to do the right thing for some very personal reasons that have to do with your own identity, your own values, and, as we have alluded to, what you can live with. It also has to do with your commitment to those you are fighting with because the bond and love that develops amongst those groups is tremendous and can be very helpful in these contexts.

We have to talk about that. I often quote from Mark Osiel the example of someone who was prevented from committing a war crime in Vietnam with just four words, “Marines don’t do that,” and it stopped them from killing a civilian. When you give those examples, you have to immediately say, “That only works if Marines don’t do that,” so there is a larger context of leadership, authority, and what is being presented by the leadership and authority as allowable, and all of that can potentially erode someone’s commitment or identity in the moment.

Last, since this is one of our topic areas, if you then add in a technology that gets in the way of you making some of those judgments or overwhelms you so that you have a cognitive load of so much information that it is much more difficult to access that part of you that might stop you from crossing a line, this is very problematic, and I worry a great deal about that when we hear things about the Lavender system, for example, that was used by Israel and it flooding decision-makers with literally thousands of potential targets and then their being asked in 20 seconds to make multiple judgments about who is and isn’t a legitimate target. The human mind cannot handle that, and at the same time I want that moral weight in the hands of a human.

CIAN O’DRISCOLL: Since moving to Australia I have had the good fortune to work with my friend Deane-Peter Baker teaching military ethics to members of the Australian Defence Force, and I moved in 2020, which was the same year that the Brereton Report was published on war crimes allegedly committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan, so is has been quite an interesting time to be part of those conversations.

Before Deane involved me in that work, I was wary of ever getting involved in any way with the military. I much prefer to talk just war theory in the theory sense in grad seminars, and I was concerned about, so to speak, compromising or tainting myself by standing too close to the flame in some sense, but now, six years down the line, I think getting involved and working with the military on these issues has been one of the best things I have done, and it has become very important to me. I have learned a great deal from it.

Specifically, I have learned the value of putting my scholarly outsider perspective on the ethics of war in dialogue with the practitioner or insider perspective and observing how they bounce off and temper one another. Observing that has been very instructive for how I approach my work now.

This is what brings me back to Shannon. One of the things I have come to appreciate is how there is always a remainder, always a leftover, in moral thinking when it is put into practice. Sometimes when you read the theory it is so hermetically sealed and so tight and perfect that there is no room for mess or ambiguity, whereas as soon as you introduce it to the real world things start to get messier.

Sometimes it gets messier in confronting ways. You find people who feel betrayed almost by the notion of just war theory and by the laws of war and will tell you that they did everything right and still feel that they have done terrible things and struggle to live with themselves on account of these things. I find it fascinating that just by engaging with these folks and listening to them back compels you to be a bit more modest in terms of how you approach what theory can do.

Again, following Shannon back to the medieval period, it reminds me of the medieval writings of Christine de Pizan and Honoré Bouvet, two figures who are keen I suppose to test and refine canonical and philosophical understandings of just war against the experience of the military men of their day. One of the things they did was put the legal and philosophical writings of their day in conversation with the perspectives of medieval knights.

That has fallen out of the just war frame, by and large. There is no room for I suppose the voice of people who are waging war to be reflected or encompassed in that tradition at the moment. The closest we get to that is military codes, but those are top-down impositions. They are legal, bureaucratic, and regulatory codes.

I find engaging with military personnel informative and challenging in the hardest but also the best possible way for this kind of work.

ADAM READ-BROWN: It is interesting to hear both of you talk about these experiences and the way they draw out and challenge you to put your philosophical money where your mouth is.

Thinking about the classroom is an opportunity to engage directly with people who are going to be living out these theoretical ideals. Perhaps one of you will take that one philosophical step further and think about the scale up from this.

Shannon, you were talking about the individual on the battlefield making the decision to pull the trigger or not, and that is certainly one large aspect of it, and that is a lot of the focus of plenty of our just war thinking, but then, with all of these considerations we are talking about today, how do we scale them up to the governance and policy level for people who are going to be making decisions about when and how war will be waged, especially given the fact that so many of these things are now being dehumanized through technology and so many of the decisions can be automated? We have to look at the next level up for the ways in which these ethical considerations are going to be put into play.

SHANNON FRENCH: I am always reminding my students that the messiness is in reality. You cannot fix it or tidy it up. It is there. It is permanent.

There is the burden of making decisions to take a nation to war. First of all, as someone living in the United States right now, I am very troubled by the fact that the way that burden was meant to be distributed when this country was founded has been diluted. It used to be very clear. It is in the Constitution after all that it was up to Congress to declare, and yet the last war that the U.S. Congress officially declared was World War II, if you can believe it. That has been degraded to a point where too few people are involved in that decision.

I was once on a radio panel with a Vietnam veteran, Ron Oram, and he was asked point blank if he could do one thing to try to prevent war, what would it be? He said immediately, draft all the children of everyone in Congress.

His point is well-taken in the sense that we here and in many other countries have voluntary militaries. That is not true everywhere, obviously, but it is in many places, and there is a civil/military divide and a detachment of many people who are not connected directly to the military, and then if you look at the leadership themselves it is not clear that they have skin in the game in a way that really matters. We throw around phrases like “committing our blood and treasure,” but whose blood and whose treasure is being committed?

I think we do need to remind people that one of the absolute requirements for a just war is last resort. Hopping ahead of that is already a tremendous violation, and it is an absolute betrayal of everyone you ask to fight in a war as well as those who are the victims at the other end to rush through any of those criteria or dismiss them.

The criteria involve all of these other considerations, some of which are mental. One of the primary just war principles is that you should be going forward with “righteous intent” and that the aim of war should be peace and so forth as well as having a just cause in the first place, which in modern times we have narrowed all the way down to essentially only true self-defense.

The erosion of these norms, the loss of these barriers to war, is extremely troubling to me, and the idea that we could move so quickly as we have done toward something that inevitably causes the death of not only those in uniform but so many civilians. I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but my understanding is that in modern war civilians actually die more than those in uniform, and I am pretty sure we could back that up quickly. All of which is to say that I think the weight of those decisions should be recognized as much greater than it is currently seen as, and it troubles me daily.

CIAN O’DRISCOLL: I hear you asking two questions in one way. The first question is about national leadership and what are the implications of this for jus ad bellum-type decisions. My way into that question would be to think about somebody like Major General John Cantwell, who was a general in the Australian Army and who has written a wonderful memoir called Exit Wounds: One Australian's War on Terror. Cantwell reflects on his experience in service at the end, when he says that he understands everything he was asked to do, why they were waging the wars they waged, and why he was doing what he did. He does not regret any of it. It was all justified, and he stands by what they did, and they did good.

At the same time, he regrets every single thing about it because it was not worth anything, and each person lost under his command was a tragedy that should never have happened. He integers back and forth between those two positions. This is a general we are talking about.

What I take from that is that on ad bellum grounds national leaders need to be aware of exactly what waging a war, even a just war, demands. How maddeningly difficult it is for the people on the ground the impossible moral positions they are put in and just how fundamentally horribly messy it is rather than perhaps hiding behind the euphemisms of theory and so on. I think a wonderful expression of this for anyone interested is the Paul Fussell and Michael Walzer exchange on Fussell’s essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb." That is a fascinating touchstone.

On the second point on technology, there is an irony here that we are talking about the human experience of war just at a time when war seems to be less human that it has ever been. I don’t know that I have a good answer to that question except to say that it is not that humans are no longer involved in the waging of war. It is that their involvement must now be understood within the context of complex systems that, as I said earlier, incorporate advanced technological components.

I am going to break a rule. I have not seen the movie yet, but from what I understand the recent documentary NAZA bears this out. To understand what is happening in Gaza, for example, it is not enough to study the AI systems employed by the Israeli Defense Force. You also have to contend with the all-too-human story of suffering and violence that set the hare running.

Aside from that, as any fan of Blade Runner will tell you, the appearance of AI may well lead to us asking more rather than fewer questions about what it means to be human. I think these questions endure.

ADAM READ-BROWN: That seems about right, and it is always good to get a Blade Runner reference in there, so thanks, Cian.

Moving over to some questions we have been getting from the chat, the first one gets at some of the questions about civilian involvement, here looking specifically at civilian institutions. The questioner asks, “What responsibility does an independent research body have when its evidence can itself become part of a conflict’s strategic ecosystem?”

We are seeing the way in which civilian information might be brought into a conflict. The questioner gives the example, for instance, that if a think tank studying a Chinese-Taiwan maritime border crisis publishes satellite analysis showing new military infrastructure, and that evidence could be used by governments, militaries, or media to advance competing narratives. How should civilian organizations like this contend with the fact that this kind of public open information might be used in a conflict and might make them targets?

SHANNON FRENCH: One initial thought I have I suppose is fairly obvious, or at least I hope so, which is that in the world in which the questioner is describing—and I think they are right that we are there already—it is once again a matter that the responsibility is everywhere. We cannot assume that making mistakes or being casual with any of our research will never have these kinds of real-world effects.

The work that we do has got to be correct because it may be used in these ways, but I think there is a further follow-on question, which is that it even raises issues around what kind of work should you be doing. Are there things that are unsafe in terms of safety for civilians for research until you know that there are ways to protect the output of that research? I think these are things that in the past people did not have to contend with, but now we know this is a possibility.

I mentioned earlier the tragic and horrific bombing of the school in Iran. I do not think that traces directly back to any particular person’s research, but it definitely shows an example of how if you are sloppy and mislabel things or misguide people in terms of the intentions that you are simply theorizing and cannot prove, you could actually be putting a target on someone’s back.

CIAN O’DRISCOLL: It is a tough and fascinating question. It is on the money and it also speaks to a contemporary move to think in more calibrated terms about participation in armed conflict and about liability to deliberate targeting. It is reflective of a move in contemporary thinking that we can draw more fine-grain distinctions on those fronts and more graduated distinctions about what counts as participation and what then renders you liable to attack. I think it is fascinating.

I am sometimes troubled by these issues, however, because I think they can also obscure or distract from the fact that the existence of twilight does not negate the difference between night and day, and while we haggle over where exactly to draw the line and how to draw the line, we should not lose sight of the fact that there is a line. You can look at babies in incubators and elderly people in old folks’ homes on one side of that line and noncombatants on the other. Obviously, the questioner was not going there, but this broader way of delineating liability to attack in these more calibrated and graduated ways is sometimes the bedfellow of some pretty funny ways of thinking.

ADAM READ-BROWN: We have another question that gets at an aspect of responsibility in warfare. The questioner asks, “Could you reflect on the responsibility of those funding the preparation for war? As we have seen in the past few years booming investments in private defense companies, what safeguards could we put in place to ensure that those responsibilities are understood?” The questioner says, “I work in finance, and I am concerned by the moral distance with which rearmament is approached.”

CIAN O’DRISCOLL: That was a live question at the ANU, where I work, for me last year when our student union did some digging and discovered that the university carried investments in arms manufacturers and that some of those arms manufacturers were producing certain technologies or components that were finding their way into jets carrying out bombing raids over Palestine. It is an issue that captures how these issues implicate us all. Sometimes when we think about the ethics of war we can think about it as something that happens over there, out there, outside the window. It is almost something that we decide to be interested in, whereas in actual fact we are always already implicated in these webs.

I am not going to answer the question directly, but I am going to say that it highlights the fascinating contribution that feminist writing on war has to offer. I am thinking about people like Betty Reardon, Cynthia Coburn, and Cynthia Enloe, who highlight the fact that war is not a discrete activity set apart from society and only waged by soldiers on the battlefield. It ripples out, and there is a bunch of-Kim Hutchings writes about this as well—social structures and forces which support it and are often highly gendered. It is much more of a mass activity than we might otherwise assume. I am very sorry not to have anything concrete to say except that these feminist writers give you a really nice angle on a question like this.

SHANNON FRENCH: From my perspective, the weapons do not bear the moral weight, but the humans do and how they use them. I still would want to keep the focus on policymakers.

I am a just war theorist and not a pacifist because I do think there are unfortunately rare cases where you do have to have an armed response. I am not inherently going to say that funding weapons development and so forth is a bad idea, but I am going to ask first of all, are weapons being developed that themselves, because of their design, are going to lead to crossing lines that I never want to see crossed because that is something that manufacturers could play a part in avoiding?

I am also going to wonder about whether the people who are concerned about this are also willing to put the energy toward changing the policies of how those weapons are deployed.

ADAM READ-BROWN: As much as I would absolutely love to continue diving into more of the questions we have from the audience, we are at a closing point here, and I think, Shannon, those final comments bring us to a nice place, trying to reemphasize human responsibility as we contend with a lot of these big technological changes.

I am afraid that we have maybe raised more questions than we have answered, but I think we have answered some along the way, and I appreciate the discussion from both of you. It has been illuminating, and I think you have given everyone a lot to think about.

Thank you very much to our audience for joining and for the great questions. There is a brief survey in the event chat where you can share about your experience today, which we would be grateful for, and just a reminder that the full recording of this event will be posted on Carnegie Council’s Ethics Empowered page, where you can also find all of our past events, so I encourage you to stay engaged and keep the conversation going. I hope everyone has a great day. Thanks very much.