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 Epilogue examines how trends from the 1990s continued to develop in the following decade. These included the growing civil–military gap, even as the American public lauded the troops as heroes; tensions between notions of the soldier as a male warrior and more inclusive visions of soldiers might be; and the question of what roles soldiers might be asked to take on. First, it explores how soldiers began to talk about themselves as ‘Spartans’, referencing their separate status as a warrior caste. It also examines how popular culture and the military itself began to increasingly venerate Special Forces ‘operators’, using these images to sell products as diverse as video games, fitness regimes and coffee blends, but also to reinforce notions of American soldiers as quasi-supermen, capable of incredible feats. Finally, it examines a cultural phenomenon that cut against the grain of ‘Spartan’ and ‘operator’ images: the ‘Fobbit’ – a term that refers to the personnel deployed to Forward Operating Bases but who avoided combat by remaining at the base, a description that then broadened to describe all sorts of personnel who deployed overseas but didn’t face the prospect of combat.

Even as the Army increased its commitment to peacekeeping, its overall strength declined, as defence budgets dropped from their Cold War heights. This drawdown saw the Army turn inwards as it managed the shift from a forward-deployed overseas force to a smaller one primarily based in the continental United States. As the Army’s numbers fell and the overseas missions it deployed on increased, soldiers and their families suffered from the increase in operational tempo and the Army struggled to retain personnel. Later in the decade, the Army faced a severe recruiting shortfall amid a booming economy, as it missed its enlistment targets in 1998 and 1999. This shortfall, which coincided with an increasing reliance on the National Guard and Army Reserve for overseas deployments, as well as internal deliberations over the changing role of the Army, prompted renewed concerns about the health of the All-Volunteer Force. Tensions between the twin ideals of the ‘citizen soldier’ and the ‘profession of arms’ were heightened after the end of the Cold War, as the Army’s leadership struggled to rethink the nature of military service while managing a large-scale drawdown from their 1980s peak.

This chapter traces the Army’s rehabilitation of its reputation in the wake of the Vietnam War. Two features were central to this transformation: the first was the advent of the All-Volunteer Force and the post-Vietnam reforms to Army training, equipment and doctrine. After a shaky start, the All-Volunteer Force’s success normalised the notion of soldiering as an occupation rather than an obligation, and reforms seemed to create a much more professional and competent force than the one that was wracked by unrest and uncertainty. Second, the Army’s performance in Operation Desert Storm affirmed this narrative of professionalism and competence. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the aftermath of the war. The celebrations that took place to welcome home Gulf War veterans stood out as the largest seen in the United States since the end of World War II. Representing a crucial moment in the American public’s deepening veneration for US soldiers and veterans, the Gulf War celebrations marked a turning point when the Vietnam-era image of the soldier as a broken or rebellious draftee was finally and purposefully eclipsed by the notion of the volunteer service member as hero.

As the Army found itself caught up in debates about a ‘kinder, gentler military’, Army leaders reacted by emphasising cultural change. Part of this cultural shift came from the bottom up, as commanders in elite combat units showed a new interest in the psychology of killing and brought in consultants to lecture their instructors on how to more effectively inculcate a willingness to kill. Much of it came from the top, though. General Eric Shinseki controversially mandated that all soldiers would wear black berets as their working headdress to symbolise a new Army culture, and he commissioned a study on the ‘warrior ethos’ and begin to enshrine that ethos into Army doctrine and training. This warrior ethos – the idea that all soldiers are de facto heroic and potential Rangers – had the goal of democratizing notions of soldiering within the Army. However, not only did the warrior ethos require all soldiers to psychologically orientate themselves towards combat, but one of the unintended consequences of the decision may have been to help to put the American soldier a little higher on the pedestal of public opinion and inadvertently widen the gap between soldier and citizen.

This chapter examines post–Cold War debates in the United States over the US Army’s participation in peacekeeping operations. Peacekeeping missions may have been a central concern of the US Army in the 1990s, but they also exposed deeper fissures within the Army and broader American society about the organisation’s proper role and the sort of attributes that American soldiers would need in the twenty-first century. Army leaders and personnel deployed on peacekeeping operations struggled to articulate which martial values best applied to peacekeeping. Political commentators tended to be much less ambivalent about peacekeeping, with some neoconservative observers enthusiastic about using such operations to practice ‘soft’ skills that would be useful in later wars, while most conservatives displayed a deep antipathy for such interventions, arguing that they corroded valuable warfighting skills and were symptomatic of an Army that had lost its way. For the few liberal commentators engaged in debates over Army policy, peacekeeping operations represented an opportunity to showcase American values and even to promote a deeper connection between the US military and broader American society.

As the Army reflected on the lessons of the Gulf War, it worried about the challenges it had faced in that war. First, the full build-up of forces had taken months, and time was a luxury the Army might not have again. Second, the triumph of precision airpower seemed to herald the arrival of the Revolution in Military Affairs that threatened to relegate ground troops to supporting roles. To help meet these challenges, Army leaders embraced the concept of ‘transformation’. With it, they pushed the Army towards a lighter, more deployable force, emphasising an ‘expeditionary culture’, and began the process of restructuring the Army around modular brigades rather than the larger, less deployable division. These brigades would be heavily reliant on lighter, faster, wheeled Stryker armed fighting vehicles, advanced communications equipment and precision weapons, and would be rapidly deployable to crisis points. Ironically, these new ‘expeditionary’ units would be heavily reliant on the support of civilian contractors, who took on increasing amounts of logistical and maintenance work within the transformed Army.