Integrity First - Integrity First: Reflections of a Military Philosopher - Review

Integrity First: Reflections of a Military Philosopher. By Malham M. Wakin. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2000. 192 pages. $60.00.

Ethics is something the military talks about a lot. Leaders frequently importune their charges with lectures about integrity, honor, courage, and other classic virtues of military culture, if not society at large. But too often such discourse is without context, and it rarely benefits from a thorough understanding of the intellectual roots of the philosophical concepts that underlay ethical thinking and practice.

The absence of such intellectual infrastructure haunts attempts by war colleges and other military forums to have in-depth discussions of the ethical dilemmas today's military leaders are likely to face. Without cognizance of the "wheres" and "whys" of the ethical tradition, such efforts often founder. Too often they devolve into superficial analyses where the end justifies the means and situational ethics reign supreme. Unequipped to see the errors of their logic, officers can leave with a distorted view of their responsibilities.

Solving this dilemma is not easy, as the basic material can be dense and formidable reading. Secondary sources may not be sufficiently focused on the military environment, or are themselves still too opaque for the busy nonspecialists. A careful reading of retired Brigadier General Malham M. Wakin's collection of essays, Integrity First: Reflections of a Military Philosopher, would help fill the void. I say "careful" because most readers will want to skip the extraneous and largely irrelevant diversions into the bureaucracy of teaching, especially at the Air Force Academy where Wakin taught for decades after seeing combat as an aviator in Vietnam.

Regrettably, the short book does evoke a sense of being a boutique volume intended mainly as a tribute to the author and souvenir for his inner group of admirers. Indeed, a disciplined editor might have turned a good and valuable book into a great and invaluable one. Given that the collection's essays were written over nearly 40 years of contentious military policies and political events, cutting superfluous material in favor of added background information would have enhanced its worth.

Still, there is much to commend the work. Its relative brevity and lucid prose invite those deterred by the weighty and nearly impenetrable tomes that seem to dominate the field. Wakin's chapter "On the Nature of Man" is a real gem. It is an exquisite tour deforce that ranges over thousands of years of philosophical thinking. It very clearly displays the genius of a veteran professor obviously skilled in making the inscrutable scrutable to generations of Air Force Academy cadets. Likewise, in the chapter entitled "Egoism as a Moral Theory," Wakin demonstrates an uncanny talent for concisely explaining the ever-popular "objectivist" thinking of Ayn Rand, a feat that has defeated a legion of other writers, not to mention Rand herself.

That said, a psychological archeologist might find it interesting to chart Wakin's presentations in light of Air Force doctrinal developments. In particular, it is noteworthy that airpower advocates, including some who would have passed through the academy during Wakin's tenure, have made statements in the aftermath of Allied Force's air operation against the Serbs that seem surprisingly indifferent to many of the ethical issues he discusses. Reflecting on the air strategy employed, a very senior officer espoused in an official publication the notion that had bombing cut off electricity and water supplies to Serb civilians earlier, the military effort might have succeeded sooner. [*] Suffice to say, destroying things indispensable to human survival, particularly in urban areas, for the sole purpose of imposing hardship on noncombatants is an impermissible application of the long-rejected concept of Kriegsraison [**] and raises significant legal and moral issues.

Perhaps the main weakness of the book from this reviewer's perspective is the failure to fulfill the promise of the title. Specifically, too often it seems the text lacks an inculcation of the military perspective. The chapter on nuclear weapons, for example, appears to take at face value the layman's view that any use of them is inherently catastrophic and morally unthinkable.

Obviously, any use of these horrific weapons would be hugely tragic, and may well have unintended psychological effects on the politics of the use of force. That is not, however, the same thing as saying the weapons could never have a use that serves right purposes. For the military officer, a dispassionate evaluation that appreciates the range of the weapons' technical capabilities in relation to classic philosophical themes would be immensely helpful. For example, weighing the utility of employing a low-yield nuclear weapon against an enemy's biological weapons facility in order to achieve the very high temperatures needed to destroy certain contagions is the kind of knotty moral and ethical issue to which a technical understanding of military realities might usefully bring context.

Likewise, the book's discussion of the military uses of technology is disappointing. Admirably, the author admits that many humanists critiquing the morality of scientific and engineering endeavors are themselves not literate in those disciplines. But one would think that a philosophy professor at the Air Force Academy would not be among them. As Carl Builder and others have noted, the Air Force is obsessed with science and engineering, ironically to the detriment of its appreciation of the art of war itself. Much the same can be said about the service's moral and philosophical bent. Wakin's brief discussion of the philosophical dimensions of technology does little to address this contention.

Nevertheless, the book does contain many hidden nuggets, and it still represents a highlight in an area of increasing importance to the military professional. One hopes that a properly edited and economically priced paperback version might someday become available. The hardback's price alone will scare off all but the most determined reader, and virtually guarantees the book will never achieve the scale of readership the text deserves.

(*.) The US commander of the NATO air forces during the Allied Force air operation, a 1965 Air Force Academy graduate, was quoted as follows:

"As an airman, I would have targeted the power grid, bridges, and military headquarters in and around Belgrade the first day of the conflict," said [the commander], who believes that's what eventually brought Milosevic to his knees. "Air power is made for shock value."

"Just Think if after the first day, the Serbian people had awakened and their refrigerators weren't running, there was no water in their kitchens or bathrooms, no lights, no transportation system to get to work, and five or six military headquarters in Belgrade had disappeared, they would have asked: 'All this after the first night? What is the rest of this [conflict] going to be like?"'

As quoted by Tim Barela in "To Win a War," Airman, September 1999, pp. 2-3 (emphasis added). These are essentially the same points reported earlier by The Washington Post. See William Drozdiak, "Air War Commander Says Kosovo Victory Near," The Washington Post, 24 May 1999, p. 1.

(**.) Kriegsraison asserts that "military necessity could justify any measures--even in violation of the laws of war--when the necessities of the situation purportedly justified it." See Air Force Pamphlet 110-3, International Law--The Conduct of Armed Conflict and Air Operations (19 November 1976), para. 1-3a(1).

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