In appreciating the institutional perpetuity of war, while simultaneously acknowledging the historically informed, inherent limitations of attempts to bound its conduct by international law, this chapter introduces the three interrelated questions that serve as the organising themes of this volume: first, is there a historical continuity with legal protections in war being informed by notions of ‘civility’ and ‘barbarity’?; second, what is the relationship between the ideals and operational realities in international humanitarian law (IHL)?; and third, what are the limitations of international laws designed to restrain excess in war? Via a brief overview of the divergent evolutions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello law, this introductory chapter further explores the sub-themes present in this volume: universalism and its shortcomings; problems with punishing violations of IHL; and the degree to which modern laws of war legitimate activities that should otherwise be prohibited.

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?

Chapter 1 serves three purposes. First, it introduces the principal question that grounds this volume: Is there something ethically special about special operations? Should special operators be constrained by the same moral framework that guides conventional military operations, or is there something inherent in special operations that justifies setting aside legal and normative restraints? The second goal of Chapter 1 is to establish a common understanding of what makes special operations and SOF distinct from conventional operations and general purpose forces. Finally, before we can assess how special operations trouble the rules of war that govern conventional military operations, we will need to outline in broad terms what these rules are. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the just war tradition.

In Chapter 5, we reflect on the ethical challenges of irregular warfare. In special operations doctrine, irregular warfare most often involves working ’through, with or by’ foreign guerrillas (unconventional warfare) or foreign counter-guerrilla forces (foreign internal defence). Engaging in armed conflict through proxies can seem like a cheap and low-risk option to policy-makers, but it also contains the potential for conflicts of interest and priorities inherent in all principal–agent relationships. If a powerful state (the principal) feels it has achieved its war aims, can it simply withdraw from a fight in which their proxies (the agent) and their SOF partners are still engaged? Likewise, proxies have incentives to mislead sponsor states as to their capabilities, intentions, and commitment to ethical warfighting. To what extent are SOF morally accountable for the ethical conduct of the foreign combatants whom they advise?

In our concluding chapter, we refocus our attention on the individual SOF operator. A career, or even a deployment, in special operations exposes operators to an exceptionally high risk of post-traumatic stress and moral injury. We argue that states, therefore, have an obligation to ’ethically armour’ their special operators against moral injury, a battlefield hazard that is just as deadly as a sniper’s bullet. Leaders at every level must ensure that SOF are educated and trained in the moral complexity of their profession. Given the emergence of SOF power as an essential instrument of statecraft, the political sensitivity that is often a feature of special operations, and the independent and improvisational decision-making that is necessary for special operations to succeed, a casual acquaintance with the ethics of their craft is insufficient. As with other skillsets that SOF are required to master, mastery in the ethics of special ops must be the standard.

In Chapter 3, we turn to recoveries, a state’s efforts to repatriate its citizens held by a hostile power or at risk of being captured. Aphorisms like ’we leave no one behind’ or ’we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ seem honourable and even righteous. Yet military operations to recover either prisoners of war (e.g., the 1970 US Special Forces raid of the Son Tay POW camp in North Vietnam) or hostages (e.g., the 1980 British SAS rescue of hostages taken at the Iranian Embassy in London) typically involve significant risk to the rescuers, non-combatants who may be in the vicinity of a rescue operation, and even the hostages or prisoners themselves who are sometimes killed in the crossfire. Ethically speaking, how should we weigh those risks against alternatives such as payment of a ransom or a negotiated prisoner exchange?

Chapter 4 examines reconnaissance operations. Reconnaissance seems, prima facia, to be the least problematic of the special operations mission set from an ethical perspective. Intelligence gathering is universally acknowledged as a legitimate operation in war and peace. Done well and according to plan, reconnaissance missions involve no loss of life and often provide information that enables more discriminate targeting. But reconnaissance operations conducted by SOF, ’special reconnaissance (SR)’, often involve peculiar moral risks. SR missions are typically carried out over a long duration, deep in unfriendly territory, and with limited or tenuous means of support available. If a SOF reconnaissance team is compromised, the consequences are particularly pernicious. Given that compromise could result in mission failure, national embarrassment, imprisonment, or death, are there moral limits to what SOF teams can do to prevent detection? For example, are SR teams ever justified in killing, detaining, or otherwise harming non-combatants to avoid discovery? Wearing camouflage is generally accepted as ethically unproblematic, but what about the practice of ’hiding in plain sight’ by falsifying personal identification, donning local garb, or even dressing in the uniform or distinctive clothing of the enemy? At what point does concealment of identity become perfidy?

In Chapter 6, we shift our focus from the individual to the unit level of analysis and consider the ethics of special operations through the lens of statecraft. Specifically, we consider a leader’s decision to employ SOF outside of an ongoing conflict, violating the political sovereignty and territorial integrity of a state with which the aggressor is nominally at peace. What moral framework should guide such a decision? The jus ad bellum convention sets an appropriately high bar for states to justify their decisions to use military force. But should the same high bar we apply to a full-scale war in which tens of thousands may perish also apply to a leader’s decision to launch a stand-alone special operations raid in which maybe a half-dozen people will be killed? What if that leader believes that a discrete application of SOF power now will prevent full-scale war later? Chapter 6 explores how states employ SOF as a force-short-of-war option, the tensions that arise when applying ad bellum principles to these operations, and the advantages and risks inherent in adopting distinct convention for force short of war – a jus ad vim convention – as an alternative to jus ad bellum.

The goal of detecting future events has several implications and two of them are explored in this chapter. First, the objective of detecting future events means that whoever poses a threat has to be targeted and if the threat is posed by a number of individuals that increases over time, enmity is extended to those individuals. This is true even if they act in the name of a terrorist group that did not exist when the conflict started. From a legal perspective, this practice is facilitated by the uncertainties related to the temporal delineation of conflicts. Second, the objective of addressing future threats entails to act against individuals who are not presently perpetrating hostile acts. This practice requires that the traditional interpretation of direct participation in hostilities be subjected to a temporal change. Instead of suspending the protection of civilians solely when ‒ and only for such time as ‒ they engage in acts that reach a certain threshold of harm, targeting enemies because of the threat they pose for the future means extending direct participation in hostilities not only to preparatory acts, but also to signs revealing membership to an enemy group. This shift is facilitated by the insufficiently defined notion of “continuous combat function.”

This chapter considers foundational Buddhist thought and the relevance (or not) of modern just war theory. A just way to think about war, conduct war, and repair harm from war from a Buddhist perspective would be to stop the endless cycle, to avoid war altogether by accepting responsibility, and addressing the catalytic harms that perpetuate it.

Anti-satellite weapons that rely on violent impacts and create space debris are regarded as a major threat to the exploration and use of space, including the use of space assets for communications and Earth imaging. This chapter examines two ways in which the testing of such ‘kinetic’ weapons might already have become illegal. First, the accepted interpretation of Article I of the Outer Space Treaty may be evolving as a result of the changing practice of the parties to that treaty. In short, many states are behaving as if tests of anti-satellite weapons that create debris are contrary to the ‘freedom of exploration and use of space’. Second, the same practice and an accompanying opinio juris may be contributing to the development of a parallel rule of customary international law. This chapter also examines the legality of the use of kinetic anti-satellite weapons, as opposed to their testing. Two additional, separate bodies of international law are relevant here: the jus ad bellum governing the recourse to armed force, which includes the right of self-defence, and the jus in bello governing the conduct of armed conflict. A close analysis leads to the conclusion that any use of a kinetic anti-satellite weapon would be illegal today because of the growing crisis of space debris.

The global governance regime for space is grounded in six decades of co-operation between the Soviet Union and then Russia on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other.

But continued co-operation is not guaranteed. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some elements of international space co-operation broke down immediately. Other elements, such as the International Space Station, notably continued. More worrying, perhaps, is the heavy reliance of Russian and Ukrainian forces on satellites, including, in the case of Ukraine, satellites owned and operated by private companies. This raises challenging issues of international law, including whether these private satellites are legal targets. It also raises the question of how far Russia might go in this regard. What if it decided to target SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation?

We are increasingly living in a world of forever wars, wherein neither party has a foreseeable determinate pathway to victory. This chapter explores three challenges for traditional just war theory raised by forever wars. First, I discuss and reject the claim that forever wars necessarily fail the proportionality and reasonable prospect of success conditions of jus ad bellum. Second, although forever wars may not be disproportionate, they do suffer from compounding errors and indeterminacy in assessing likely future costs and benefits. Finally, I consider time-variant value and discounting, wherein future goods are deemed to possess less value than present goods. Discounting is a feature of the appraisal of financial and monetary goods, and it seems to play a role in some moral judgements also. Subjecting the expected costs and benefits of war to discounting over time significantly impacts the moral permissibility of forever wars. Time variability impacts ad bellum judgements about the justification of war as well as in bello decisions, generating a reason to prefer weapons that generate immediate strategic advantage, but whose collateral costs often occur far in the future.