ABSTRACT
The current fighting in Afghanistan and operations in Iraq are deadly serious, physical tests of Britain’s armed forces. Nothing following in this chapter should belittle that fact. However, in another, cerebral, context, a ‘Balaclava moment’ has been reached in their comprehension of ‘military ethics’ and the ‘moral component of military effectiveness and fighting power’ (The three ‘components’, first identified in a Ministry of Defence publication British Military Doctrine (MoD 1989), are ‘physical’, ‘intellectual’ (formerly ‘conceptual’) and ‘moral’). While research is being hurriedly conducted to establish first principles of ‘military ethics’ (Stage One in the Haldane-Spearman Consortium Project 2006), guns to the right are firing volleys demanding ‘keep it simple; our [combat] soldiers have a reading age of eleven years’, and guns to the left guns thunder ‘where is the intellectual rigour?’ Guns in front pound away at the mature and traditional pragmatism of institutional practice – consisting of the steady logical, military thinking and appropriate counter-intuitive insights of British commanders, the genius for practical solutions of non-commissioned officers, and the solid commonsense of the troops (see, for instance, de Lee 2004).
