Abstract
This chapter focuses on education and moral training. As service members enter the military, training plays a vital role in instilling military cultural frameworks in cadets and academy students in an intense process of inculcating the warrior identity. Alongside intensive training on rules, norms, combat, and the like, ethics education and moral training find varied relevance. With deep roots in Christian theology, religion is not absent from such training, even if it remains implicit. This chapter investigates the historical just war tradition roots and overarching influence of Christianity in military ethics education and the differences between training provided to enlisted versus that of officers.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Like the other service members and chaplains, I assigned a pseudonym to the professor for the sake of confidentiality.
- 3.
See for instance Operational Law Handbook 2010, p. 38, that calls out and condemns a “just following orders” defense—likely as a specific response to situations like the My Lai Massacre or more recent atrocities like the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse crimes in the early years of the Global War on Terror.
- 4.
Ch. Fischer requested that his presentation not be reproduced, so what follows is a description of his approach instead.
- 5.
WHINSEC is a DoD educational institute overseen by the US Army. In addition to US military officer training, the institute also provides training for over thirty countries of the Western Hemisphere.
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Suitt, III, T.H. (2023). Christian Influence and Variation in Military Ethics Education. In: Narratives of Trauma and Moral Agency among Christian Post-9/11 Veterans. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31082-9_3
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