Book contents
- The Ethics of Special Ops
- The Ethics of Special Ops
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Raids
- Chapter 3 Recoveries
- Chapter 4 Reconnaissance
- Chapter 5 Rebels
- Chapter 6 Not Quite War
- Chapter 7 Ethical Armouring for Special Operations Forces
- References
- Index
Chapter 2 - Raids
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2023
- The Ethics of Special Ops
- The Ethics of Special Ops
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Raids
- Chapter 3 Recoveries
- Chapter 4 Reconnaissance
- Chapter 5 Rebels
- Chapter 6 Not Quite War
- Chapter 7 Ethical Armouring for Special Operations Forces
- References
- Index
Summary
In Chapter 2, we address the ethics of raids, those daring, made-for-Hollywood missions like Operation Neptune Spear, the raid to capture/kill Osama bin Laden. Often characterized as ’high risk, high reward’ missions, we consider the moral challenges that that phrase implies. Do big payoffs justify rule-bending or rule-breaking? And who shoulders the high risk? The operators themselves, of course. But do promises of a big payoff justify placing non-combatants at additional risk? And what if that big payoff is a specific person as was the case in the bin Laden raid? As a discipline, military ethics has focused its attention primarily on contests between nameless combatants. It has paid scant attention, relatively speaking, to state-sponsored operations to hunt down and kill a specific person. Is this ever morally permissible? If so, under what conditions? What are the crimes that warrant a death sentence pronounced by a foreign government? Must a state first exhaust reasonable attempts to capture the named target? Does the method of execution matter ethically?
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- The Ethics of Special OpsRaids, Recoveries, Reconnaissance, and Rebels, pp. 30 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023