Physics, History, and the German Atomic Bomb. This paper examines the German concept of a nuclear weapon during National Socialism and the Second World War. Zusammenfassung: Physik, Geschichte und die deutsche Atombombe. Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die deutsche Vorstellung einer nuklearen Waffe während des Nationalsozialismus und des Zweiten Weltkrieges.

This essay introduces this special issue on virtue ethics in relation to military AI. It describes the current situation of military AI ethics as following that of AI ethics in general, caught between consequentialism and deontology. Virtue ethics serves as an alternative that can address some of the weaknesses of these dominant forms of ethics. The essay describes how the articles in the issue exemplify the value of virtue-related approaches for these questions, before ending with thoughts for further research.

This essay offers a proposal for the missing constructs and language with which we can more precisely think about and examine the Army's Professional Military Ethic, starting with its macro context which is the profession's culture. We examine three major long-term influences on that culture and its core ethos, thus describing how they evolve over time. We contend that in the present era of persistent conflict, we are witnessing dynamic changes within these three influences. In order to analyze these (...) changes, we introduce a more detailed framework which divides the Ethic into its legal and moral components, then divide each of these into their institutional and individual manifestations. Turning from description to analysis, we also examine to what extent, if any, recent doctrinal adaptations by the Army (FM 3-0, 3-24, and 6-22, etc.) indicate true evolution in the essential nature of the profession's Ethic. Then, we present what we believe to be the most significant ethical challenge facing the Army profession -- the moral development of Army leaders, moving them from 'values to virtues' in order that they, as Army professionals, can consistently achieve the high quality of moral character necessary to apply effectively and, in a trustworthy manner, their renowned military-technical competencies."--P. x. (shrink)

This monograph surveys the history of the Army's professional ethic, focusing primarily on the Army officer corps. It assesses today's strategic, professional, and ethical environment. Then it argues that a clear statement of the Army officers' professional ethic is especially necessary in a time when the Army is stretched and stressed as an institution. The Army officer corps has both a need and an opportunity to better define itself as a profession, forthrightly to articulate its (...) professional ethic, and clearly to codify what it means to be a military professional."--Summary. (shrink)

We all know the numbers: two million US troops were deployed to designated combat zones in Iraq. Of them, 4500 were killed in service. By the most conservative estimates, 30,000 were wounded, but this statistic fails to take into account the most commona and often just as disablinga category of combat-related injuries: post-traumatic stress disorder and related traumatic brain injury. For 'Army of One', photographer Elisabeth Real looks beyond these numbers to the individual soldier. From 2006 to 2012, she (...) spent time with six men who served in Iraq and whose lives have been irreversibly altered by the war. (shrink)

Records of certain Government Departments known to have purchased scientific instruments from designated suppliers over long periods are potentially important sources of information on both instruments and their makers. The Office of Ordnance was one such Department. Investigation of its financial and administrative records has shown that the appointment ‘Mathematical Instrument Maker to his Majesty's Office of Ordnance’ brought the holder a substantial trade in instruments for drawing, surveying, and military purposes. Detailed entries in the Bill Books enable (...) not only types, quantities, and prices of instruments supplied to be determined, but also the purposes for which they were required. In many cases the actual users of the instruments are named, with their locations in Great Britain and overseas.The records of the Office of Ordnance are extensive, covering the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century in over ten thousand volumes or bundles. This paper provides an introduction to what is available, and examines in particular the period 1748–1772 when George Adams senior was Mathematical Instrument Maker to this Office. It is shown that during this period Adams supplied over 1500 instruments, ranging from drawing pens to theodolites, detailed in 148 bills amounting to a total value of £2425. Some other well-known instrument makers, such as Thomas Wright, Benjamin Cole & Son, and Jesse Ramsden, were also occasional suppliers of instruments in the same period, while from 1765 onwards the records include bills for instruments purchased by the Office of Ordnance for the Royal Observatory from makers such as Dollond and Bird. The total number of instrument makers' bills located and examined in the period searched, including the 148 by Adams, was 166. In addition, though not within the scope of this paper it was observed that the records contain numerous bills by William Deane before, and by Jeremiah Sisson after, the period of Adams' appointment respectively. (shrink)

La circolazione dell’Arte della guerra di Machiavelli ha dato un fondamentale contributo allo sviluppo della cultura militare europea in volgare del Cinquecento. Questo saggio analizza alcuni specifici aspetti della ricezione di quest’opera nella produzione scrittoria militare del tempo e in particolare si concentra su quegli elementi di pensiero legati al tema delle “armi proprie” fortemente propagandato dal libro machiavelliano. A questo proposito, si è qui deliberatamente scelto di offrire l’esempio di due opere diverse per natura ideologica e altezza cronologica: l’una (...) risalente alla prima metà del Cinquecento, l’altra originatasi nell’ambito delle guerre di religione e della diaspora dei protestanti francesi in area elvetica. Si tratta, in effetti, di due libri che permettono di comprendere sfumature poco note del processo di riuso di certi concetti machiavelliani che all’epoca potevano essere considerati politicamente controversi. Al tempo stesso, le due opere sono capaci di far risaltare le difficoltà che emergono ogni volta che si prova ad applicare il moderno concetto di autore a testi nati in un contesto caratterizzato da un continuo riutilizzo e dalla rielaborazione di temi ed elementi ascrivibili a una lunga e articolata tradizione di scrittura militare che si sviluppò lungo il corso del secolo, la quale, tuttavia, aveva trovato un momento di passaggio cruciale nel contributo di Machiavelli. (shrink)

Most work on the public-private division concerns itself with identifying the lines between both and the historical developments that shifted this line. These contributions provide an aerial view that pays little attention to the interactional micropolitics of privacy. The present article uses a pragmatist approach to analyze the local negotiation of privacy and publicity. It relies on scholarship on “accounts” and “aligning actions” to view “privacy-work” as an attempt to remove actions from having to account for them in a specific (...) social group and “publicity-work” as a converse attempt to draw them out by demanding that actors account. Thus, I will understand privacy as whatever is hidden, situationally, behind “moving armies of stop signs” for alignment demands. (shrink)

A state's foreign policy is constrained by parameters that inhere in the structure of the international system and in the nation's own political‐constitutional, social, and economic systems. The latter, domestic parameters, include “public opinion.” Because the public is largely ignorant of foreign affairs, policy‐making elites have wide scope for acting more rationally than would otherwise be possible, although public opinion operates on the second‐order effects of foreign policy (e.g., taxes, casualties)—inviting mismatches of objectives and means. The prevalent nonrational theories of (...) foreign‐policy derivation are themselves largely ignorant of the dominantly rational processes of the state, particularly in its foreign and military functions. (shrink)

Army Officers face increased moral pressure in modern warfare, where character judgement and ethical judgement are vital. This article reports the results of a study of 242 junior British Army officers using the Army Intermediate Concept Measure, comprising a series of professionally oriented moral dilemmas developed for the UK context. Results are suggestive of appropriate application of Army values to the dilemmas and of ethical reasoning aligning with Army excellence. The sample does slightly less well, (...) however, for justification than for action reasoning, and there are differences following initial training for infantry and artillery officers versus other branches of service. Dilemmas involving anti-torture methods and not covering up soldiers' failings generated best results compared to those requiring balance between compassion and mission, and negotiating personal relationships with military needs. Gender differences favouring women were less than those observed for other professional groups using similar measures. This research further develops a much-needed measure of ethical reasoning among junior Army officers, with potential for use among other ranks. This approach is advocated for other professional groups. (shrink)

The authors argue that an urgent leadership issue has arisen which is strongly, but not favorably, influencing our professional culture--a hostility toward religion and its correct expressions within the military. Setting aside the role of Chaplains as a separate issue, the focus here is on the role religion may play in the moral character of individual soldiers--especially leaders--and how their personal morality, faith-based or not, is to be integrated with their profession's ethic so they can serve in all cases "without (...) reservation" as their oath requires. Related products: Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Latvia can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01225-3 Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Turkey can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01223-7 Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Lithuania is available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01224-5 Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Chad is available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01226-1 Aspects of Leadership: Ethics, Law and Spirituality is available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-055-00255-9 Faith and Hope in a War-Torn Land: The US Army Chaplaincy in the Balkans, 1995-2005 eBook available from Google Play eBookstore. Please use ISBN: 9780160872792 to search their platform for this product; Paperback format available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-029-00440-2. (shrink)

À la fin du xixe siècle, l’armée française se présente comme la grande école censée transmettre aux conscrits les valeurs du « modèle militaro-viril ». Mais les soldats ont-ils toujours retenu cette « leçon de virilité »? Poser la question revient à s’interroger sur les réceptions différenciées de ce modèle en s’inspirant de quelques principes méthodologiques posés par les gender studies. Car avant d’être une représentation valorisée de masculinité, le modèle militaro-viril est une catégorie de genre dont l’usage s’inscrit dans (...) un rapport de force, qu’il s’agisse de justifier l’obéissance militaire, la domination masculine, raciale ou sociale. Ce modèle ne peut donc être considéré comme une représentation uniforme transmise à l’ensemble du contingent mais bien comme le produit toujours singulier d’une relation de pouvoir visant à naturaliser certains effets de domination et à susciter un désir d’identification. (shrink)

En 2017 se descubrió en el seno de la Bundeswehr (Fuerzas Armadas) de Alemania una conspiración conocida como Tag X (Día X). Esta operación se había articulado a partir del embrión de un posible “Ejército en la sombra”, apoyado por organizaciones paramilitares, y su objetivo era tomar el poder mediante el uso de la violencia y el terror Der Tag X (El Día X). Esta dinámica culminaría con la puesta en marcha de una “limpieza étnica”, la eliminación de los “enemigos (...) internos” y el establecimiento de un Estado autoritario. La tesis que mantenemos es que el origen de esta conspiración militar está íntimamente asociada a un conjunto de transformaciones políticas, sociales, económicas y culturales que se han producido desde la última década del siglo XX y que han creado una situación favorable para el ascenso de la extrema derecha en Alemania y “legitimado” a militares de esta ideología para intervenir en el proceso de toma de decisiones políticas. (shrink)

Zou Rong received a classical education but, uninterested in an official career and frustrated by the irrelevance of his schooling to the day's issues, traveled to Japan in 1901 to further his studies. There he wrote The Revolutionary Army, which was published in Shanghai after his return to China in 1903. The Revolutionary Army, which was scathingly critical of the Manchu rulers of China, enraged government authorities who sought his immediate arrest. Zou was protected by authorities of the (...) International Settlement in Shanghai, and eventually sentenced to only two years in jail. Be this as it may, Zou contracted an illness in prison and died in April of 1905. The Revolutionary Army is far more than an anti-Manchu racist tract. It advocates political and social revolution, and Zou's account of the justification for and goals of these revolutions rests in no small part on natural rights and independence, as discussed in the two chapters from the work that we translate here. (shrink)

This paper is about women nurse veterans from the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps (RAANC) who served in Vietnam. I aim to develop an understanding about these nurses that might place their experiences into a wider context. My conclusions provide starting points for future studies on myth, remembering and oral history.

Since military planners must know the size and shape of the earth if they hope to track earth-orbiting satellites and to target missiles on distant lands, geodesy was an important concern of the two superpowers during the Cold War. The most important geodetic product in the United States was a series of increasingly powerful World Geodetic Systems, the first of which was published for the Department of Defense in 1960. Although WGS 60 was created because of intense international rivalries, it (...) reflected the intense rivalries between America's Army and its Air Force, and it introduced the notion of 'political geodesy'. My attention to American events does not indicate a lack of interest in the Soviet story; rather, I hope that historians with better language skills and better access to Soviet documents will examine geodetic research on the other side of the former Iron Curtain. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to draw attention to an issue which has been largely overlooked in contemporary just war theory – namely the impact that the conditions under which an army is assembled are liable to have on the judgments that are made with respect to traditional principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. I argue that the way in which an army is assembled can significantly alter judgments regarding the justice of a war. (...) In doing so, I present and defend a principle of ‘just assembly’ and argue that satisfying this principle is an essential part of any deliberation regarding the justice of a particular conflict. (shrink)

Volume 18, Issue 2, July 2019, Page 165-167.

The explosion of academic research in organizational studies provides new understanding of organizational and human behavior. The life of Witold Kieżun, a man of action and a first class scholar, parallels this scientific work, where he directly experienced vast changes in the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Empire, and the academic studies of organizations in North America and Western Europe. His primary interest what is managerial decision-making, and the various tools and constraints that lead to superior outcomes.

An account of the Home Army’s elite paratrooper unit, formed at the outset of the war under orders of General Sikorski. The article recounts the unit’s formation and subsequent operations.

This essay offers a case study in jus in bello in the American Revolutionary War by focusing on responses to sexual violence committed against American women by soldiers in the occupying British army and their Loyalist auxiliaries. Two main bodies of sources are juxtaposed in order to explore the contexts and manner in which jus in bello was adjudicated: British courts-martial and American Congressional investigations documenting British and Loyalist breaches of the codes of war. By putting the fragmentary evidence (...) of instances of rape in the context of contemporary legal and sociocultural practices of sexual violence in peacetime, as well as of the British army's disciplinary regime, we can elucidate the horizon of experiences and expectations against which survivors, assailants and prosecutors acted. The British army disciplined some soldiers for sexual offenses that violated military law and the codes of war, and it executed a few of them at a time when even their home society featured very low prosecu.. (shrink)

A research project by the Schools of Theology and Psychology of Australia’s Charles Sturt University surveyed a large sample of Salvation Army officers. This article considers survey responses to two questions relating to end-of-life care: the use of pain medications that may shorten life, and the cessation of fluid and food intake. The results of the analyses are evaluated in terms of Michael Banner’s proposal that moral theology should more assiduously converse with ‘patient ethnographic study’, which the survey instantiates (...) to some extent. Banner’s proposal and the results of the survey are contrasted to Peter Singer’s analytical moral philosophical dictums on end-of-life care. The results are also compared to a metastudy by Andrea Rodríguez-Prat and Evert van Leeuwen of 14 ethnographic studies of those who wish to hasten death at the end of life. We conclude that respondents exemplify a form of moral reasoning that is embedded within Christian spirituality; counters the assumptions of Singer’s approach; contrasts the diminishment of ‘meaning’ at the end of life, as seen in Rodríguez-Prat and van Leeuwen; and deserves further respectful ethnographic study. (shrink)

Military service in general and combat service in particular can be physically and psychologically stressful. Previous studies have focused on risk propensity and risky behavior among soldiers. Yet knowledge is still lacking regarding the impact of type of army service on soldiers’ risk perceptions. The current study examines how type of army service and negative incidental emotions affect risk perceptions. Results of a survey conducted among 153 combat and non-combat Israeli soldiers indicate that respondents serving in combat units (...) on average have more pessimistic risk perceptions than non-combat soldiers. Yet no significant differences emerged between combat and non-combat respondents with respect to their levels of negative incidental emotions. Regression analyses suggest that higher levels of negative incidental emotions are correlated with pessimistic risk perceptions among all respondents, while higher levels of risk attitude are correlated with pessimistic risk perceptions among combat soldiers but not among non-combat soldiers. (shrink)

Generous parental leave policies are popular in a number of countries around the world and are usually seen as a sign of the ‘family friendliness’ of the state. Relying on in-depth interviews with mothers on parental leave in Hungary, the authors argue that the context in which the policies are implemented should be examined when evaluating their consequences. In semi-peripheral, resource-poor Hungary lengthy parental leave policies turn women into an invisible ‘reserve army of labourers’. While their employment is mostly (...) unaccounted for in aggregate statistics, and political discourse suggests that their ‘job’ is to look after children, nevertheless many women do end up doing some work for wages during the almost five years they spend on parental leave. However, given the rigidity of the labour market and rampant discrimination against mothers with small children, their chances of obtaining formal employment are small. They therefore resort to doing ad hoc, temporary, informal work, which is often underpaid and well below their qualifications. Thus generous family policies do not necessarily indicate the ‘women friendliness’ of the state and may not lead to the relatively favourable trade-off between stable public sector work and lower wages suggested recently by comparative researchers. Instead, in this specific context, which combines legacies of state socialism, a backlash against women’s emancipation before 1990 and a peripheral, vulnerable labour market, familialist policies are associated with a high degree of marginalisation for women with small children in which the state is at best complicit, at worst, an active agent. (shrink)

The influence of the army on the life of society, on the situation in the world, and especially on relationships between states with opposing systems, on their social political and economic development, on scientific and technological progress and on culture has become the subject of an acute ideological struggle. Publications by Soviet authors have devoted considerable attention to exposing the reactionary and unscientific nature of bourgeois views about the army, and to the antipopular and aggressive essence of imperialist (...) armies, especially the U.S. army. In the present article we shall attempt to provide a critical analysis of the latest bourgeois theories about the role of the army in the international and domestic life of modern states. (shrink)

Purpose The aim of the paper is to assess the hacktivist group called the Syrian Electronic Army and determine what their motivations in terms of ethical and poetical motivations. Design/methodology/approach This paper looks at chronological examples of Syrian Electronic Army activities and assess them using a developed hacktivist criteria to try and gain a greater understanding of the motivations of the Syrian Electronic Army. The paper uses a netnography research approach. Findings This paper determines that the Syrian (...) Electronic Army is motivated to protect the Syrian Government. This protection is highlighted by the new media and social media organisations that the Syrian Electronic Army attacks online. Research limitations/implications This paper focuses only on one group the Syrian Electronic Army. Practical implications A greater understanding of the Syrian Electronic Army. Social implications A greater understanding of the development of hacktivism. Originality/value A unique study into the motivation of the Syrian Electronic Army. (shrink)