 So our panel, this panel is called Moral Injury, What Are the Future Costs of Today's Wars? So I'm not sure how many are here are familiar with this term, but there's a relatively new term, Moral Injury, that's now become a part of public discourse about wars, the impact of wars, the way in which people experience war. To a large degree, it's stepping into a space that plays a role in, you can compare it to the commonly used term, PTSD. So we've now come to a place where PTSD is used all over the place, it's widely referenced, there's this new term Moral Injury, and the question is, what is this term, what sort of work does this new term do? What does it allow us to understand and speak about that is worthwhile? So we're going to ask this question to everybody on this panel, all the bios that you know are in the program. We'll start with David Wood. David has called Moral Injury the signature wound of the post-911 wars, and so what do you mean by that and what is the value and use of this term Moral Injury? Right, so this is suddenly important. We had General Milley this morning talking about having to prepare soldiers to make ethical decisions very, very quickly. That's exactly what we're talking about with Moral Injury. So I think I could best explain the idea of Moral Injury by telling you a quick story about a Marine named Nick Rudolph, who was 22, second combat tour in Afghanistan, in a bad firefight outside of Marja, and at some point he saw somebody coming around the corner of the building, shooting at him and his fellow Marines with a semi-automatic rifle, and he got that person in his sights and realized it's like a 12-year-old kid and shot him dead. So that's what the military calls a good kill, right? I mean, he's a combatant, doesn't say anything in the Geneva Conventions about how old a combatant can be or not be. Nick is protecting the people he loved most in the world, his fellow Marines, so good to go on that score. But he killed a child, you know, and when he comes home, he's a person who kills a child and he asked me, you know, what kind of person kills a child? Those are his words, by the way. So there's a Moral Injury, very distinct from PTSD, which is fear-based. It's an inappropriate activation of the fight-or-flight syndrome, and I know lots of guys who have it, and there's a whole spectrum of symptoms and problems that they deal with, so PTSD is real. But I think everybody who goes into war, and especially the wars we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria comes back with some kind of Moral Injury, which is defined in academic terms as a violation of your sense of what's right. So for Nick Rudolph killing a child, that wasn't right. One of the difficulties in having military people wade into ethical situations is that they go with a really powerful sense of what's right, and this is stuff that we grow up with, but it's also those values that the military lays on top of those. And one of the most powerful ones is, you're responsible for your buddy no matter what, right? Does that mean killing a child? Yes, it does, you know, and that's one of the things that Nick Rudolph worries about. Pardon me. Here's why it's important, because increasingly, as General Milley said this morning, we're going to be sending people into combat, into increasingly difficult ethical situations, like, do you kill a child or not? And we don't prepare kids like Nick Rudolph, he'd never heard of Moral Injury, never occurred to him that he might be facing a child who's shooting at him, and what to do, never had a discussion about that. So we got a job ahead of us. Number one, recognize Moral Injury, try to better define it, and number two, better prepare our combatants who we're sending into these very, very difficult ethical situations where you have to make a life-changing decision in a split second. So David, by the way, has won a Pulitzer Prize for a series on Moral Injury and also has a new book on the subject. Tom Frayn from University of New South Wales. So you've also written a book about Moral Injury, and what do you see as the value of this term for helping to refocus our attention on the impact and cost of war? Well, you mentioned PDSD previously as being pervasive, and so I was encountering people at the Defence Force Academy where I work who said, PDSD, that isn't me, but I know that I have some kind of inner wound that is not properly dealt with by what they're offering me in responses to PDSD. We've moved towards the view that Moral Injury is a consequence of a disordered personal narrative that's reflected in very often a disabled moral compass, which may take the form of, I'm not sure anymore there's right and wrong, or I'm willing to contemplate doing things now that previously I wouldn't have thought of because I see the world quite differently. When people joined the military, I joined at 16. The story that I had when I joined was combined with the story that I was given. The difficulty is the story that people get given all the way from recruitment to remembrance is not a straight line. It's not consistent. It's usually undergirded on the proposition that the state and the soldier have a bond in as much as the soldiers are a member of the state, and their service is about protecting the people and property in which they have a share. The kinds of conflicts that we've talked about today are somewhat distended from, if you like, being concerned about sovereign territory, say, of Australia. It's people, it's offshore waters. We are sending people to places and trying to convince them that this at some point will serve Australia's national interest. It will protect the Australian people when they may be in different places and think this isn't true at all. Or they hear the political narrative, which for our country is, we're doing this because we're America's ally. And people thought I joined, I thought, to defend Australia at sovereign interests and people, yet I'm doing this and I can't see how this particular thing I'm doing then relates to what I thought was the bond that I had, the duty that I wanted to reflect in my service in joining the Australian Defence Force. So we believe that there was some scope to talk about other kinds of unseen wounds that people take. For me as a personal experience, 30 years ago, I was in a ship and we fished body parts out of the South China Sea. They were probably Vietnamese who were on their way as refugees from Vietnam to Australia. I remember we gathered all the body parts up and that was bad enough. We took them to the nearest Southeast Asian port and the response was, why did you bring that rubbish here? And I remember at the time and if I close my eyes, I can almost be reduced to tears of thinking, what kind of world do I live in when human remains are being treated like this? So what remains with me now 30 years on is not that I saw body parts in the water because the sharks hadn't taken the bits that we had recovered. It was that we lived in a world where people were treated like this and we tried to take them back out and give them some sort of farewell in the seas from which they'd come. But I just felt somehow damaged inside by that. And so I think the experience we need to think of in moral injury is not just necessarily in combat but for everything that uniform people do, which is humanitarian aid, disaster relief, it could be convoy escort work, it could be stabilisation missions, all of those kind of things where they think this is the right thing to do but the rules of engagement either required me to do the wrong thing or precluded me from doing something. As a human being I felt that I should have done and I think David is right. The future cost is a disruption to the morale of a country sending people and plainly the veterans bill for many of these conflicts can be as great as the cost of the operation itself. And the problem if people are young is not of this is going to be two, three years, if they're only in their 20s and they live till their 80s we have a 60-year liability to help these people recover from whatever they may have seen. And in our case, for instance, we sent people to Bali after the Bali bombings and my closest friend, his job was to look after the morgue. So there's two things, what he saw of the body parts but also taking people through and it's their reactions to what they saw, what kind of world do we live in where human beings can inflict this one upon the other. So I do think this is an urgent subject for us all and particularly for our three nations represented here this afternoon. Thanks. Professor Andrea Elner here from King's College London. So the same basic question, what's the value of launching onto the world this term moral injury? I came to the whole question of moral injury through a book I co-edited and to which I contributed a chapter in the conclusions on selective conscientious objection a few years back. And what I found, and so I looked at particularly U.S. war resistors and what I found very poignant about them was that many of them had very serious clashes of their own morality with what they experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly in Iraq first and then Afghanistan as well. And I wondered whether there's anything intrinsic to the kinds of conflicts that I was talking about and they had been deployed into or whether it is a conflict inherent thing. But I think there is clearly a long history of moral conflicts, ethical dilemmas that combatants have to go through and are likely to get involved in deployment and in operations. But what seemed a recurring theme or what was one of the recurring themes was the difficulty in distinguishing between civilians and enemy combatants and at the same time a roll out of ROEs at some rules of engagement at some stage, particularly in Iraq, which left the responsibility for making the decision whether to identify a person coming their way as a combatant or as a civilian trying to reconstruct Iraq and therefore had a shovel in the back or maybe a mobile phone. And the moral conflict that's imposed on the people in that situation could be quite extreme. So the question for me was then, well, is there anything we can do to help prevent this? I think preventing moral injury in conflict is not possible as a wholesale measure. There will always be situations where this is likely to rear its ugly head. But I think society as a whole has a responsibility in asking whether causes or reasons for going to war are legitimate. I think if the legitimacy question of a war is settled, then that is much more likely to help people at least see themselves as being able to fight a morally just cause and not feeling that they are told that they are fighting a morally just cause and they don't really quite buy into it. And the other question is how are wars being fought so that if the war is being fought in a way which is ethically responsible. Some war resistors who went AWOL, who ended up testifying after they'd left the US armed forces would say, well, I observed someone else do something which so totally violated my moral conscience and I didn't know what to do about it because he was a superior officer. That's a really difficult thing to have to live with because your military values at the same time tell you that you have a responsibility to show moral courage and integrity. And then the question of loyalty comes into play. So I do think moral injury is a concept which invites us to really seriously think about military culture, about leadership, about ways of at least helping people alleviate or overcome moral pain before it turns into moral injury and hopefully prepare them better for it. But the preparation is not necessarily a medical or resilience thing. I do think it has a lot to do and as an academic I would say it has a lot to do with education. With education at a level of engagement with philosophy which allows people to adapt their decision making in the situation rather than having a set of rules which they are then expected to apply. And to give people in operations or on operations also the chance as a leader through creating a command climate which allows dissent, which allows the flagging up of concerns, of worries in order to then hopefully improve the situation. And so at the moment, I'm just looking at the clock, it's ticking heavily. I will now stop my academic deliberations and hand over to you. As not a person who's scholar, engaged in moral injury and scholarly fashion but as a veteran, how does this term operate for you? Does it do any productive work? Is it useful? Well, it is actually because it helps me categorize experiences that didn't fit neatly anywhere else. My last job in the military, I just retired last year from the Navy was as a speech writer for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and he would often say that we go to war with our values, something we've heard throughout today. And as been mentioned on this panel here, we operate in the military with our values, not just go to war. I'm reminded of being in my early 20s at sea on a guided missile destroyer in the Arabian Gulf reinforcing the UN resolutions against Iraq oil smuggling and stopping merchant ships that we thought were in violation of that. In the course of these duties, we came across some fishermen or Iranians on a boat who had been stranded at sea for several days. By the time we had spotted them, they'd been floating for three or four days and had resorted to drinking seawater to stay alive, which as you know is one of the worst things you can absolutely do. We found them, we pulled them on board. I was the intelligence officer on board, so I had a Farsi linguist who was able to communicate with them. We gave them food, clothes, medical treatment. We even gave them ball caps from our ship. The captain asked me, young Ensign Johnson, can you get them home? And being the proactive young naval officer wanting to show his moral courage and his metal, his expertise, I said absolutely, having no idea what the answer was. Talked to my Farsi linguist. We radioed because I had frequencies as the intelligence officer. We radioed directly the Iranian port in Bushir and asked them to send a tugboat. Under the cover of night they did just that, an Iranian flag vessel pulled up next to our destroyer. We transported those men over to the ship. They were whisked away and we felt great. One of the laws of the sea is to rescue mariners in distress and we'd done that. Two weeks later we found out those men had been hung and accused of associating with the great white Satan. So we had to tell these sailors who had, many of them for the first time had been deployed, some from one in particular sticks with me. He had just left a pretty rough neighborhood in New York City where he'd seen a lot of his friends gunned down. He was the guy on the big eyes, the binoculars that spotted these fishermen. So he was able to save these men and he left the neighborhood to get away from death and his spotting these men in some way led to their death. So these are the kinds of injuries. This isn't PTSD. This is where you felt like you were doing the exact thing you'd been trained to do, where your principles, you held true to them and it still resulted in death. I often think, should I have lied and said these men are asking to go to Bahrain and are claiming political asylum, knowing that maybe they would have a better chance to live. Should I have radioed a merchant tanker and put those men on that ship and made it someone else's problem so at least their rescue wouldn't have American footprint, fingerprints on it. That may have been a better solution but that's not what we were trained to do. We did exactly what we were trained to do. It worked perfectly and two men were killed as a result. What do you call that? What do you do when there is direct tension between the lives of others and the principles that you hold dear? So it seems clear from all of your interesting responses that the term does something, it's valuable, moral injury. You've explained reasons why. So we don't have that much time in the panel to ask each of you to, we're here in DC, it's a policy-oriented environment. In one minute, what is, what policy value can we pull from the use of this term which will no doubt become as widely deployed and used as PTSD has been? So David. I think we have to recognize that we send people into harm's way and into incredibly difficult and complicated ethical situations which for reasons of brain development and life experience, they're absolutely unable to resolve correctly. So military has to take account of moral injury and at least introduce the term and find ways, and there are lots of ways, there's lots of literature, read my book. There's lots of ways to prepare people to confront moral injury, and I think it's a shame that we don't do that. The other thing is that we, civilians, have a responsibility to the people that we send into harm's way who came back morally injured. A lot of ancient societies and even some societies today have formal rituals of cleansing and forgiveness. We don't have anything like that, we need to think about that. Tom. I think connecting the narrative between recruitment and remembrance so that we don't find people on operations saying, I didn't join for this and then having come back when they then experience remembrance, that's not what I did. There's a great deal of looseness in how we portray and picture service among those who join, and I do think there's lots of contrary messages and connecting that with the political narrative. So here's the grand strategy. This is your place in it. This is how you advance the national interest when it's not altogether plain will help people have a broader context into which they can place their own perhaps morally injurious experience. Super fast response. Maybe something about trust, Andrea? I will try. We have spent some time talking about the alternative reality that is often communicated to us today, and I do think civilian society has a very, very serious responsibility to hold government to account and to engage fully in the political process that leads potentially to the deployment of troops. Whether that doesn't necessarily need to be constitutionally sanctioned as in we ask Parliament or Congress to give us the right to go to war, because not in all countries that is the case, but a full and frank and critical debate with the political side of things is quite important, I think. And Ted, maybe do you have any thoughts about this recruitment narrative linking the way in which service is presented and the way in which it's lived? So I think the... For a long time, the Navy's catch line was a global force for good, and I think that's a good thing. The issue is there is so much doctrine and regulation that governs every decision you make, so when you come up with a situation, there is a checklist that you go through on all the steps to take. In the old days of sailing, Navy commanders had latitude once they left port, because there was no way to talk to them in real time. And now technology makes that quite possible, almost where the oversight becomes a burden. If commanders, I think, had more latitude and want to do in those situations where you're in sort of sticky moral territory, they can make the decision best for their crew as long as it doesn't undercut national security interests. But that may be out of step with local theater level regulations or ways of doing business. In the situation I mentioned, there was no diplomatic relations with Iran, so it was sort of figure it out, but here are the things that cannot happen. And maybe we could have come to better solutions if I wasn't only constrained to either leaving this Minnet Sea or trying to get them home. Maybe some of these things that felt like a violation of principle if the commander had latitude would have been acceptable and they would be alive today. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.