The U.S. Military Lacks an Ethics Doctrine. Combat Effectiveness Suffers

In 2004, I was a boot (translation: brand new) first lieutenant in 1st Battalion, 7th Marines at a retransmission site in the middle of nowhere, al-Qa’im, Iraq. I heard a sudden explosion and small-arms fire two kilometers away. The battalion radio net burst with chatter, with someone saying there were three casualties: two urgent surgicals (send help quickly!) and one routine (no rush to provide aid).

Someone in the operating center asked about the status of the routine casualty, and the radio crackled with the kind of transmission that changes everything. “It’s Whiskey Six, he’s KIA [killed in action].” I locked eyes with my staff sergeant, and we both took a moment to process the brutal truth of what happened: The battalion’s weapons company commander was killed in action. What hit me in that moment was not what I had been prepared for. The Marine Corps trained me well — tactically sound, physically hardened, and practiced in planning. I knew my equipment, my mission, and my men. What came through that radio, though, was something none of that training had touched. It arrived all at once: fear, rage, a hollowness that I had no framework for, a vertigo that no field exercise had ever simulated. I was morally unprepared for war. The irony is that the Marine Corps’ seminal doctrine, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, Warfighting , names this problem explicitly in its very first chapter: “Human dimensions and moral factors.” Clausewitz , from whom the Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 draws from heavily, wrote that “war is an extreme test of one’s physical, mental, and moral strength.” “The moral factors,” he argued, “are among the most important on the battlefield.” The Marine Corps’ foundational warfighting doctrine agrees. However, no service has built a program around it. No one trained me for the moral weight of that radio call. Recent scholarship has addressed this exact gap.

Key points

• Someone in the operating center asked about the status of the routine casualty, and the radio crackled with the kind of transmission that changes everything.
• “It’s Whiskey Six, he’s KIA [killed in action].” I locked eyes with my staff sergeant, and we both took a moment to process the brutal truth of what happened: The battalion’s weapons company comman…
• What hit me in that moment was not what I had been prepared for.
• The Marine Corps trained me well — tactically sound, physically hardened, and practiced in planning.
• I knew my equipment, my mission, and my men.