A "military professional" is some one responsible for managing the military's destructive power. Military professionals include both most com missioned officers, staff as well as line, and some non-commissioned officers, but not military lawyers, physicians, or other auxiliary personnel.

Military professionals in the armed forces of the United States are required by law to follow certain explicit and implicit rules beyond what ordinary morality requires. Where, for example, a conflict arises between the interests of humanity and other interests, military law requires a military professional to give first priority to the good of humanity, second priority to the interests of the client-state, third priority to the military profession, and last priority to personal interests. Military law also stipulates that a military professional is obligated to refuse to follow orders that violate either the "written or unwritten" laws of war.

Moral Integrity
Clearly, a military professional must be able to make and execute moral decisions and must possess, therefore, moral integrity and competence. Moral integrity is a long-range commitment to specific moral principles; a person of moral integrity does not change moral principles for the sake of expediency or personal convenience. Competence is the skill and knowledge necessary to realize moral objectives once they are determined. Indeed, as General Mal Wakin has argued, a military professional has a moral obligation to be competent.

Members of other professions are required by their codes of ethics to follow similar moral priorities and to possess moral integrity and competence. What distinguishes military professionals is that their client, the state, has authorized them to exercise its greatest destructive powers, with the understanding that those powers will be exercised as far from those served as possible. Given this power, the military professional has a unique obligation to be constrained by moral integrity and competence in the conduct of war.

The uniqueness of this obligation creates peculiar tensions and temptations. Because civilians do not understand and are reluctant to contemplate the corrosive ugliness of war, military professionals create their own society with its own language and rituals, and are tempted to give higher priority to the interests of this professional in-group than to the interests of humanity or the client- state. This temptation, if yielded to, can substitute peer pressure for individual professional judgment. If this substitution is made, moral integrity is lost and the military professional is tempted to exercise power without any moral restraint.

Civilian Control
The most obvious manifestation of the temptation of military professionals to put their own profession first is the constant reoccurrence of military dictatorships in Asia, Africa, and South America. So far, we have blunted this temptation in our country by strong emphasis on the principle of civilian control of the military. The temptation, however, is always there and is made stronger by an increasing disinclination on the part of civilians to question the morality of the conduct of war.

General MacArthur's defiance of civilian authority in the conduct of the Korean War was widely supported and was deflected only when the president himself intervened, relieving MacArthur of command, but most civilians understood and discussed the issues in question. What was different during the invasions of Grenada, Panama, and Iraq was that most civilians seemed to believe that civilian knowledge and control of the conduct of war was itself immoral. They accepted and even endorsed military control of press coverage, and seemed indifferent to the fact that what civilians do not know they cannot control. They tolerated and even applauded the president's abdication of military decision- making and seemed to ignore the fact that this would increase the temptation on the part of the military to give highest priority to its own interests.

The Vietnam war will be remembered as one in which individual sol diers frequently abandoned their indi vidual moral integrity and yielded to peer pressure to exercise power with out moral restraint. My Lai is the paradigm case. But reporters from the press and TV covered the Vietnam war well and little happened that re mained long hidden. By way of contrast, we are just beginning to learn about mass destruction and burial of the poor in Panama and the concealment of casualties from our own "friendly fire" in the Gulf War, and we may never know all the violations of moral integrity and competence that were hidden because the public and the politicians encouraged the military to give higher priority to a quick victory than to the long-range interests of humanity and the nation.

Loyalty v. Morality
The point is a simple one: the mili- tary professional is torn by two demands that are often in con- flict—loyalty to fellow professionals and the moral principles of fellow human beings. Both demands must be met, but it is critical that priority be given to the moral demands. Unless civilian authority enforces morality in the conduct of war, the military has a strong tendency to give priority to professional demands, a tendency that can lead, as it often has, to the exer cise of its great destructive power without any moral restraint.

Some may object that civilians who seek to leave knowledge and control of the conduct of war in the hands of the military are not engaging, thereby, in immoral activity, but are properly motivated by a desire to win wars quickly and avoid the waste of human life a drawn-out war generally pro duces. This desire, it has been often argued, should not be condemned as immoral but rather praised as morally courageous. "Moral constraints" which prevent us from winning wars quickly, so the argument goes, are for that reason immoral.

Obviously, wars have been won by states exercising no moral constraint. What must be denied is that such wars were moral simply because they were won. Going to war is morally justi fied only if it is the only way to pre serve basic human values. To argue that the only way to preserve such values is to abandon them in the conduct of the war is to concede by contradiction that those values were not basic and to admit that our reasons for going to war were not moral in the first place. Those who claim that we should ignore moral constraints in waging war, cannot, therefore, be making a moral claim. They are raising, at most, an empirical question: Can we win a war to preserve our basic human values without sacrificing them in the conduct of war?

The litmus test, which determines that an action in war is morally wrong, is the intentional destruction of inno cent human life. The innocent are those, such as children, whose actions make no difference in the outcome of the war. We intentionally kill them when we knowingly engage in actions that necessarily result in their death. Our empirical question, then, can be rephrased as: Can we win wars with out engaging in actions that we know will result in the death of those whose continued ac tions would have no affect upon the outcome of the war?

Those who claim that we cannot be moral in the conduct of war must argue for a negative answer to this question. Many have done so on the assumption that any war conducted today will inevitably become a nu clear war in which the innocent will necessarily be killed. If they are right, two opposing conclusions may be drawn. The first is that all war today will be immoral and must be avoided. The second is that we must abandon all moral constraints and be ready, willing, and able to engage in nuclear war.

There are two reasons for believing that we do not have to embrace either conclusion. First, for over fifty years, the world has avoided nuclear war despite hundreds of "little wars." Second, the military has responded positively to the growing reluctance of citizens in America, Russia, and elsewhere to accept large numbers of military casualties.

Some have contended that civilian reluctance to send large numbers of young people to their death signals an end to patriotism, but that reluctance may just as well signal a growing desire to impose moral constraints on the conduct of war. As we saw in the Gulf War, our political and military leaders reacted to this civilian reluc tance by planning and executing swift, low casualty campaigns based on the use of high technology weapons. In such campaigns, the intentional de struction of the innocent is greatly reduced. In future wars, there can be an even greater use of "smart" weap ons and—even better from a moral point of view—non-lethal weapons including low-frequency sound waves, calmative agents, and laser rifles.

The Future
Clearly, civilian knowledge and control of such developments must be maintained; otherwise political and military leaders may use esoteric weapons to create a military mystique to serve their own narrow political and professional interests. If development of such weapons proves practical, we can encourage our leaders to answer the empirical question in the affirma tive: Yes, we can win wars to preserve our basic values without sacrificing those values in the process.