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  • Chapter 2 - Raids

  • Deane-Peter Baker, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Roger Herbert, United States Naval Academy, Maryland, David Whetham, King's College London
  • Book:
    The Ethics of Special Ops
    Published online:
    16 November 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023, pp 30-52

  • 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?