The Moral Status of Military
Deception
By Major John Mark Mattox, US
Army
________________________________________________________________________
FROM
AT LEAST as early as the Trojan War, military leaders have sought to achieve
tactical and strategic surprise.Although an ancient military principle, the
importance of surprise has by no means diminished with the passage of time.If
anything, as advances in technology have increased the tempo of warfare, they
also have made surprise more important (albeit more difficult) to
achieve.
Recognition
of the vital role that deception of all kinds plays in military operations is
clearly evident in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Memorandum of Policy 116:
“Historically, military deception has proven to be of considerable value in the
attainment of national security objectives, and a fundamental consideration in
the development and implementation of military strategy and tactics.Deception
has been used to enhance, exaggerate, minimize, or distort capabilities and
intentions; to mask deficiencies; and to otherwise cause desired appreciations
where conventional military activities and security measures were unable to
achieve the desired result.”[1]
That
deception is now, and for the foreseeable future will be, an essential
component of U.S. military tactics, operations, and strategy is clear.The Joint
Chiefs continue: “The development of a deception organization and the
exploitation of deception opportunities are considered to be vital to national
security.To develop deception capabilities, including procedures and techniques
for deception staff components, it is essential that deception receive
continuous command emphasis in military exercises, command post exercises, and
in training operations.”[1]
For
moral philosophers, statements of this kind invite an important question:"Why,
in a profession deeply rooted in and deeply concerned with moral values, might
one hold that deception of any kind is morally acceptable?"The position
that deception is morally permissible as long as it is directed toward one's enemies
presents a host of difficulties. Certainly, in private conduct, one is almost
never given moral license to act in an intentionally deceptive way.Moreover,
governments (at least democratic ones) are rarely, if ever, recognized as
having the right to deceive those subject to them, even if the deception is for
an ostensibly good aim.
Because
deception involves the intentional misleading of moral agents, it seems to be
tantamount to lying.To the extent that this is true, the claim that military
deception is morally acceptable appears to be riddled with theoretical
difficulties.In order to appreciate the magnitude of the moral-philosophical
problem at issue, consider, for example (among many possible examples), the
Kantian position on the moral status of lying.Kant holds that there exists no
condition in which lying constitutes other than a morally blameworthy
act.According to Kant, even if one defines lying as nothing more than “an
intentionally untruthful declaration to another man,”[1]
one still could not be justified in concluding that the lie did no harm.“For a
lie always harms another; if not some other [specific] human being, then it
nevertheless does harm to humanity in general, inasmuch as it vitiates the very
source of right.”[1]If Kant is
right, then lying in the context of armed international disputes should be a
matter of particularly acute moral concern for soldier and noncombatant alike,
because everyone -- both soldiers and noncombatants -- could fall victim to its
ill effects.One of the most obvious ill effects of lying would be the erosion
of confidence in any utterance made on behalf of a nation or its military.As
Kant argues, “truthfulness is a duty that must be regarded as the basis of all
duties founded on contract, and the laws of such duties would be rendered
uncertain and useless if even the slightest exception to them were admitted.To
be truthful (honest) in all declarations is, therefore, a sacred and
unconditionally commanding law of reason that admits of no expediency
whatsoever.”[1]Because
Kant’s prohibition against lying is absolute by reason of its being “an
unconditional duty which holds in all circumstances,”[1]
the necessity to avoid it would seem to constitute a duty that extends both to
soldiers on the battlefield and to the war-making politicians who direct them.
Whether
one views lying from the Kantian perspective or from the perspective of some
other standard framework of moral philosophy, the general disapproval of lying
by the Western philosophical tradition is clear.Even though certain instances
of lying might gain approbation under the terms of some (say, certain
consequentialist) accounts of morality, still at least it may be said that to
the extent that one regards lying as an intrinsically evil practice, the
prohibition against it is necessarily absolute.Hence, if military deception
amounts to nothing more than a specialized kind of lie, on what
moral-philosophical grounds is it possible to justify it?
Three
alternatives present themselves as possible accounts for the moral status of
military deception:
We
have already encountered the first alternative: simply to argue that military
deception is tantamount to lying.In this case, as argued above, the practice
seems difficult if not impossible to justify on moral-philosophical grounds.(Moreover,
as a practical matter, while this alternative admits an elegant solution,
namely, the discontinuance of all deceptive practices in war, it is by far the
most difficult to imagine being put into multilateral practice within the
international community.)
The
second alternative is to adopt the position of the military realist and to
argue that although military deception may be nothing more than a kind of
lying, because ‘all is fair in war,’ one need not have any moral scruples
concerning its practice.However, this is totally unacceptable for adoption by
the armed forces of the United States because it involves a moral stance that
runs altogether counter to the demands of the customary law of war, the
international treaties relative to the humane conduct of war, the Federal
statutes that govern the conduct of U.S. military personnel, and the value
system which the U.S. armed forces claims to espouse.
The
third and perhaps most promising alternative is to argue that military
deception is, in fact, something essentially different from lying as understood
by Kant, such that the set of all morally permissible military deceptions is
not coextensive with the set of all lies, as shown in the following Venn
diagram:
This seems to be the position
adopted almost universally by the prominent legalists and just war theorists
since the Middle Ages.What is wanting, however, is an adequate account of how
lying and military deception differ, and hence, of how military deception might
be understood to constitute, within certain specifiable parameters, a morally
acceptable activity.
Military Deception as an
Institutionalized Practice
The
law of land warfare makes specific provision for deceptions of various
kinds.For example, the Hague Convention of 1907 succinctly states that “Ruses
of war and the employment of measures necessary for obtaining information about
the enemy and the country are considered permissible.”[1]However,
it also states that “it is especially forbidden . . . To kill or wound
treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army [or] To make
improper use of a flag of truce, of the national flag, or of the military
insignia and uniform of the enemy, as well as the distinctive badges of the
Geneva Convention [e.g. the red cross symbol, etc.].”[1]With
respect to the duties of parlementaires appointed to enter into communications
with an enemy, the convention states:“The parlementaire loses his rights of
inviolability if it is proved in a clear and incontestable manner that he has
taken advantage of his privileged position to provoke or commit an act of
treachery.”[1]
The
Geneva Convention provides a somewhat expanded treatment of the same themes:
It is prohibited to kill,
injure, or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the
confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is
obliged to accord, protection under rules of international law applicable to
armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute
perfidy.The following acts are examples of perfidy:
the
feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender;
"Good Faith"
Consistent
with this principle, one might argue that because war is itself a social
phenomenon, it presupposes a shared understanding among its participants of the
social practices it entails.This is so even if the participants do not agree on
the particular details of how war ought justly to be executed.As pertaining to
the question, “What constitutes morally permissible deception in the context of
war?” there seems to emerge from the writings of the canonical figures of just
war theory the common view that the moral permission to deceive in war is not
unlimited.Moral permission to deceive one’s enemy appears to be constrained
largely by the jus ad bellum dictate that peace must be the ultimate
objective of war, and that, accordingly, the only violent actions morally
permissible in war are those that will hasten the restoration of a just and
lasting peace.
With
this in mind, the idea of "good faith" imposes itself as the sine qua
non of morally acceptable military deceptions.The relationship between peace as
the ultimate objective of war and the expectation of good faith becomes evident
in the words of
de Vattel: without good faith,
“War would degenerate into cruel and unrestrained acts of violence and there
would be no limit to its calamities. . . . If there were no longer any faith
between enemies, the only certain end to a war would be the complete
destruction of one of the parties.”[1]
Why is
it that the absence of good faith would destroy any basis for the restoration
of peace?It is because the absence of good faith implies the intention by those
who lack it not to comply with rationally shared expectations.Thus, without
good faith, the absence of which is implied by the perpetration of illicit
deceptions, there exists no rational basis for the minimization either of
violence or of suffering, and hence no expectation that a just and lasting
peace is actually the true aim toward which the war is prosecuted.As Grotius
observes,
Rightly . . . Cicero says that
‘it is an impious act to destroy the good faith which holds life together’.To
use Seneca’s phrase, it is ‘the most exalted good of the human heart’.And this
good faith the supreme rulers of men ought so much the more earnestly maintain
as they violate it with greater impunity; if good faith shall be done away
with, they will be like wild beasts, whose violence all men fear.Justice, it is
true, in its other aspects often contains elements of obscurity; but the bond
of good faith is in itself plain to see, nay more, it is brought into use to so
great an extent that it removes all obscurity from business transactions.[1]
But
how does the concept of good faith assist in the determination of what counts
as a morally allowable military deception?Clausewitz observes that “war is
nothing but a duel on an extensive scale.”[1]To
think of war as a duel is useful in the present context because it highlights
the fact that both duels and wars presuppose the observance of certain
conventions or practices and thus carry with them certain expectations.For
example, a duel presupposes that the duelers will separate themselves a
mutually agreed number of paces and that they each will fire at the other a
certain number of shots in a mutually agreed manner.Therefore, if the shared
expectation is that the duelers will separate themselves by an interval of,
say, ten paces, and then turn and fire one shot, then, if one of the duelers
turns after five paces and fires multiple shots, that dueler has clearly failed
to act in good faith.
Perhaps
a richer analogy might issue from a sport such as American football.This
example is valuable for the fact that it features the shared expectation that
each team deliberately will attempt to deceive the other.By any account, a
football play that is successful by reason of its embodying a well-conceived
and skillfully executed deception deserves the commendations of friend and foe
alike.Indeed, it is entirely normal for a team that has fallen prey to its
opponent’s deceptions to praise the opposing team for its demonstrated
skill.However, that does not mean that the permission to deceive is unlimited
as long as it constitutes a demonstration of skill.For example, if a team
scored a touchdown with a play that included passing the ball out of bounds,
into the spectator stand, through the stand from one spectator to another, and
then back into bounds in close proximity to the goal, that team would receive
fully justified scorn for the play.Clearly, this is so because the game of
football includes no shared expectation that touchdowns be scored in a manner
that requires the ball to be passed first out of bounds and then back in
bounds.More accurately stated, it positively includes the shared expectation
that all points will be scored as the result of play conducted completely
within the boundaries of the playing field.Note that rules themselves are not
sacrosanct; they are changed from time to time under the direction of
organizations that govern the sport.Hence, it is not the presence or absence of
any particular rule or practice that counts as an illicit act, per se; it is
the violation of shared expectations concerning the extant rules, whatever the
rules might be.
The
same might be said of war as a social practice.For example, de Vattel, writing
in 1758, observes, “It is reported that since the commencement of the present
hostilities between France and England, an English frigate came within sight of
the coast of France and made signals of distress in order to decoy out some
vessel, and thereupon seized the boat and made prisoners of the sailors who generously
went to its aid.”[1]He comments that
“If the report be true, the contemptible trick deserves severe punishment.”[1]He
then provides the justification for his position:"It [acting in bad faith
by using a sign which, by commonly understood and accepted convention, is
expected to be reserved for bona fide conditions of distress] tends to prevent
the giving of charitable assistance, so sacred a duty among men, and so
commendable even between enemies.”[1]“Besides,”
he concludes, “to make signals of distress is to ask men for help, and thus
impliedly to promise perfect safety to those who give it.Hence the act
attributed to the frigate was a detestable breach of good faith.”[1]
We
come now full circle to the question of whether it is, in fact, morally permissible
to deceive in warfare in the light of the almost universal moral prohibition
against lying, or deliberate deception.A possible answer to the question is
that military deception is morally permissible because of the shared
expectations that arise from the nature of war as a highly specialized form of
social intercourse.Properly speaking, war is not a normal social setting.Hence,
it admits of certain highly specialized -- and highly specifiable -- exceptions
to the normal set of moral expectations for human conduct.For example, war
permits the taking of human life, the restriction of personal freedom without
due process of law, the destruction of public and private property, deprivation
of the necessities of life, and so forth.It is at least plausible, therefore,
that an institution that allows these things, and counts them as morally
acceptable within the institutional context, could likewise allow deceptive
practices that it counts as morally acceptable.
Given
this approach to understanding military deception, it is possible to argue that
lying per se and military deception are, in fact, morally incommensurable in
the same way that murder and the execution of persons convicted of committing a
capital offense (or the taking of lives of combatants in war) are, by some
accounts at least, morally incommensurable.To the extent that lying and
military deception may be found to differ, one may argue that they are subject
to significantly different criteria (some of which may overlap but not
necessarily so) for moral evaluation.
Problems
Admittedly,
this approach offers little for those who draw no moral distinctions between
such things as murder and capital punishment.For that matter, it may be that
those who find this solution to be morally deficient will encounter similar
difficulties finding a moral justification for war at all.However, it should be
recalled that the just war tradition is based upon a very strong presumption
against war; it merely maintains that if a nation finds itself unavoidably
confronted with the prospect of war, that nation is morally bound to ensure
that it both enters into and prosecutes the war as justly as possible, and in a
manner that minimizes suffering and facilitates the restoration of peace.With
that in mind, it likewise should be noted that deception has been used many
times in warfare to hasten the accomplishment of these ends.
For
one who holds that military deception is merely an example of a special kind of
lie, the original tension between the position that one is never justified in
lying and the position that identifies war time as a permissible exception to
the otherwise absolute prohibition against lying remains unresolved.The
tradition that allows for military deception includes numerous safeguards
designed to prevent abuse of the permission, granted by the tradition, to
deceive an enemy.Nevertheless, if lying is an activity that rightly belongs to
the set of those things that humankind should recognize as categorically
morally forbidden, then no number of safeguards on the permission to lie or
deceive in war will serve to eliminate the logical contradiction.Conversely, if
military deception as sanctioned in the West is, in fact, something that should
be regarded as morally permissible, then one of two conclusions must obtain:
either the prohibition against lying is not absolute, or military deception is
not lying per se.
At
first blush, one might be tempted to dismiss the argument that lying and
military deception are fundamentally different as a sleight-of-hand trick -- an
attempt to have one’s philosophical cake and eat it too.Nevertheless, the
argument that lying, by its very nature, always involves a breach of faith,
whereas morally permissible military deception, by its very nature, never
involves a breach of faith appears to offer a reasonable basis for
distinguishing the two phenomena.Indeed, those who have addressed the topic
throughout the history of Western warfare -- particularly within the context of
the just war tradition -- have almost universally agreed that military
deception, if practiced in good faith (i.e., in such a way that no explicitly
made promises are broken and that no implicitly understood obligations to one’s
enemy are disregarded), is morally acceptable by reason of its being mutually
understood, at least tacitly sanctioned, and institutionalized as a regular
practice among participants in warfare.
Another
criticism which one might be tempted to levy against this argument is that if
deception is immoral for individuals, it also must be immoral when it is
perpetrated by the state.However, the state has long been recognized as
competent to act in certain ways that individuals are not.For example, the
state can proscribe or mandate certain behaviors, and it can take measures to
enforce compliance with its edicts.It can try a person for life or limb, and it
can imprison or execute those found to have defied its authority.More relevant
to the present study, it can both declare war and prosecute the war by a
variety of means, to include the practice of military deception.A private
citizen -- or more properly, one acting in the capacity of a private citizen --
can do none of these things.Even one who acts as an instrumentality of the
state can act only in ways that the state directs.
Of
course, this does not mean that the state can do whatever it pleases without
the need to concern itself with moral boundaries.Suffice it to say, however,
that whatever problems this concern might raise for military deception, it also
raises for any and all other activities that are morally forbidden to
individuals but traditionally permitted to states.The crucial point for present
purposes is that military deception as codified in the extant international
treaties poses no additional theoretical problems that would lead one to
conclude that the practice should be evaluated separately from, say, the
practice of lying to suspects of crimes in police interviews as a part of the
criminal investigative process.Both activities, right or wrong, are done at the
behest of the state, and both activities claim moral justification at least on
the consequentialist grounds that the overall good of humankind is better
served by these activities than not.
This
proposed solution in no way authorizes soldiers to deceive an enemy while acting
in a private capacity.The permission to deceive, when it exists at all, extends
only to persons who are acting in their official capacity as instruments of the
state in the same way that an executioner acts as an instrument of the state
when administering capital punishment.Of particular interest on this point is
Plato’s argument that governments, acting on behalf, and in the collective
interest, of the governed, can indeed lie: “The rulers . . . of the city may .
. . fitly lie on account of enemies . . . for the benefit of the state.”[1]However,
he quickly adds that no such entitlement extends to anyone except the rulers
acting for the good of the state: “for a layman to lie to rulers of that kind
[i.e., the political leadership] we shall affirm to be as great a sin, nay a
greater, than it is for a patient not to tell his physician or an athlete his
trainer the truth about his bodily condition, or for a man to deceive the pilot
about the ship and the sailors as to the real condition of himself or a fellow
sailor, and how they fare.”[1]Plato
is adamant on this point because lies told to advance the cause of individuals,
and not the cause of the collective good of the state, are by their very nature
destructive to the state.
In
company with these concerns, it should likewise be noted that what I have
called the principle of shared expectations is not totally without
difficulties.For example, it may be (and probably is) the case that not all
cultures share precisely the same set of expectations concerning what is
morally acceptable as wartime conduct.By way of analogy, consider the case in
which a soccer team (that plays strictly by the rules of soccer) engages in a
contest with a rugby team (that plays strictly by the rules of rugby).From the
perspective of the soccer team, its opponent may appear to play with no rules
at all.From the perspective of the rugby team, its opponent may appear to be
unnecessarily particular in its insistence that the game be played in a
‘restrictive’ way.Both teams are playing by the rules -- their rules -- but
neither team can have realistic expectations concerning the other team’s
conduct on the playing field.Some will agree that this analogy illustrates
important aspects of the British experience in the Boer Wars or of the American
experience in Viet Nam: a rule-bound (if not generally rule-abiding) army
engaged in combat against a guerilla force that, from the perspective of the
former, did not conceive of war as an activity bound by moral rules.
Indeed,
a guerilla force might raise a white flag of truce for the express purpose of
luring a just opponent into an ambush.Some armies might conceal military
headquarters in hospitals or send civilian children or other noncombatants into
enemy camps to gain intelligence or to commit hostile acts against unsuspecting
combatants.Deceptions such as these that involve breaches of good faith have
always been present in combat and probably always will be.However, the fact
that they exist does not justify the position that war should be fought, and
deceptions perpetrated, without the restraint of rules.If both parties to a
conflict practice illicit deceptions, then any hope for a speedy restoration of
peace is greatly diminished.Failure to appreciate this point has led some to
justify unlimited acts of violence, such as occurred in the My Lai massacre in
1968, that cannot meaningfully be described as moral by means of any rational
account.Indeed, a nation might well be justified in suspending recognition of
an unfaithful enemy’s flag of truce, in revoking the protected status of an
enemy’s hospitals when its hospitals have been used as military command posts,
or in treating as combatants any civilian who acts with hostile intent; but it
is almost impossible to imagine a circumstance involving breaches of faith that
would justify rapes, summary executions, and mutilations as occurred in the My
Lai massacre.
Finally,
one can admit a certain discomfort over the analogies used in this
argument.Notwithstanding the explanatory value of analogies that liken war to
duels or football games, these analogies naturally have a pernicious quality
about them; their seeming innocence can, if one is not careful, anesthetize one
to the genuine horrors of war.The taking of human life is a serious thing,
whenever it occurs.So is deception.My claim is not that deception -- even the
limited case of military deception -- encourages the moral behavior of
individuals and nations.Quite the contrary, any grant of permission to deceive
under any circumstances is likely to have the insidious effect of
self-propagation, of justifying its use in other morally questionable
circumstances.Rather, my claim is simply this: The ends of morality would be
served best by the termination of all wars and the realization of universal
peace.However, given the inevitability of war in the present human condition,
the next best way to serve the ends of morality is to conduct war in a way that
ameliorates suffering and hastens the restoration of just and lasting peace.To
the extent that military deception contributes to the realization of this
imperfect aim, the claim -- its difficulties notwithstanding -- that military
deception, as institutionalized in Western warfare, is a morally permissible
practice appears to be one that will withstand honest philosophical scrutiny.
All of
these difficulties merit careful reflection, and I do not wish to suggest that
these brief reflections have served to lay them entirely to rest.I do, however,
submit that the account offered here of the moral status of military deception
accurately describes the logic that the Western world has used for over two
millennia to determine which wartime deceptions can be tolerated on moral
grounds and which cannot, to wit: that all acts of military deception be
circumscribed by the imperative to act in, and only in, good faith in all of
one’s dealings with an enemy.Whether that logic is altogether satisfactory, or
whether humankind should take a different collective approach to its moral
assessment of military deception is perhaps an interesting question, but one
beyond the scope of this study.
A Word About
"Institutionalization"
The
idea of institutionalization as it has been invoked in this argument is one
that merits specific comment.Institutionalized practices are practices that the
members of a group share and that they expect others within the institution to
observe.For example, Western society expects, as evidenced by The Hague and
Geneva Conventions, that parties to international agreements (such as
cease-fire agreements, peace treaties, non-aggression pacts, etc.) will regard
those agreements as inviolable.By the same token, Western society also expects
that participants in war will aggressively seek occasions in which to deceive
opponents in war in recognized ways (e.g., sending false communications,
feigning movements of combat forces, attacking at unexpected times and places,
etc.).Indeed the expectation is so thoroughly entrenched that any party to an
armed conflict that refuses to deceive in these and similar ways would be
regarded by onlookers from the community of nations as naive in the extreme.
I
do not intend to present the idea of ‘institutionalization’ as an argument for
moral relativism -- the idea that something is morally right or wrong simply
because a segment of society -- or even society as a whole -- wills it so.It
is, of course, possible for a society to institutionalize morally repugnant
practices (such as genocide in Nazi Germany).Nor do I wish to claim that such
moral acceptability as military deception enjoys derives from a hypothetical
social contract.Rather, I claim that it derives from the premise, which as best
I can ascertain stands as an absolute moral principle, that human beings are
obligated to deal with one another in good faith.Imagine, for example, a
society in which everyone lied.If everyone lied, then no one would expect
anyone else to tell the truth.Hence, there would be no breach of good faith via
the act of lying.From this standpoint, the moral repugnance that attaches to
lying results from the fact that there does exist among humans the expectation
(in principle) that all people ought to tell the truth.Therefore, in reality,
the idea of"institutionalization" or "shared expectations"
as intended here might itself actually derive from some foundational principle
that sounds very much like the Golden Rule.
Beyond the Horizon
The
precise nature of the political order that will govern conduct among nations in
the twenty-first century is yet unknown.This much, however, seems clear: the
extent to which true and lasting peace and cooperation among nations can be
established depends upon the extent to which nations trust one another.If
nations in the twenty-first century find that they cannot resolve their
differences without resorting to war, the wars they fight are likely to be
shorter and, all things considered, less bloody if they avoid deceptions that
involve breaches of faith.Tactics and technologies may change; government
administrations and forms of government may undergo revolution; alliances may
form and dissolve; but good faith has an enduring quality because it provides
the logical basis for all covenants and promises.Indeed, without good faith,
there is no basis for the exercise of any faith that a yet unfulfilled
obligation will be fulfilled.One certainly could argue that the nation that
sets aside good faith will gain the quickest advantage in war.However, that
advantage is almost always short lived because, as human history attests, those
who are thus deceived do not soon forget or forgive breaches of faith.Moreover,
there is no particular reason to believe that the advent of high-tech military
gadgetry will make morally deficient deceptions more desirable options for use
on the battlefields of tomorrow.If anything, the highly sophisticated capacity
for electronic surveillance that is now propagating around the globe should
serve to make attempts at deceptions of all kinds, both licit and illicit,
higher-risk propositions than they have been at any time in the past.Hence, it
may well be that the challenges facing armies and nations in the third
millenium A.D. will be such as demand that the moral dimension of deception
operations be evaluated with greater care than ever before.