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During the nation's worst conflicts, soldiers have wrestled with the morality of killing during combat Pete Kilner argues that leaders have a responsibility to train combat soldiers to kill during combat but leaders also have an obligation to explain the moral justification for such killing. He further argues that leaders must explain the morality of killing so soldiers can live with themselves in the years after combat.
THE METHODS that the military currently uses to train and execute combat operations enable soldiers to kill the enemy, but they leave soldiers liable to postcombat psychological trauma caused by guilt. This is a leadership issue. Combat training should be augmented by explaining to soldiers the moral justification for killing in combat to reduce postcombat guilt. Soldiers deserve to understand whom they can kill morally and why those actions are indeed moral.
Military leaders are charged with two primary tasks-to train and lead units to fight effectively in combat in accordance with the war convention and to care for the soldiers they command. Military professionals generally hold these two tasks to be complementary, accepting Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's statement that the best form of welfare for troops is first-class training.
American military leaders have been very successful in creating combat-effective units. In response to the U.S. War Department's research indicating that less than half of World War II riflemen fired their weapons at the enemy in combat, the military instituted training techniques. These techniques-fire commands, battle drills, and realistic marksmanship ranges-resulted in much-improved combat firing rates. During the Vietnam war, similar research reveals combat firing rates of 90 percent.1 Unfortunately, this improved combat effectiveness has come at a cost to soldiers' welfare. The training techniques leaders have employed to generate the advances in combat firing rates have resulted in increased rates of postcombat psychological trauma among combat veterans.
Training that drills soldiers on how to kill without explaining to them why it is morally permissible to kill is harmful to them, yet that is currently the norm. Modem combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli, such as fire commands, enemy contact, or the sudden appearance of a "target," that maximizes soldiers' lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to...