ABSTRACT

Military doctrine provides a corporate conceptual framework for analysing the use of force. The formalisation of doctrine is a comparatively recent development in Britain, beginning in 1989. This chapter examines the genesis of the Military Covenant from the mid-1990s within the context of what military doctrine had identified as the Moral Component' of Fighting Power. It explores how Values and Standards and Soldiering, the core publications of the Moral Component, represented an ethical stock-take by the Army. With all doctrine having a potential readership among civilians, any examination must be mindful of its institutional role in promoting and defending the Army, particularly to policy-makers. The Army's assertion of its right, then of its need, to be different from civilian society in the context of the legal component' will be assessed. Above all, the development of the Moral Component represents the Army setting out its institutional vision of the civil military relationship.