 Hi, I'm Dr. Lindsay Kohn. I'm here teaching in the National Security Affairs Department. I teach strategy and policy analysis But my research is on civil military relations. So I'm very happy to be here to talk with Professor Robinson and Professor Douglas. I Will try and give you a little bit of insight into the American side of the equation We've heard about Britain and Canada and a little bit also about the rest of Europe and then I think we'll also talk a little bit about attitudes towards the military and about the military I'm Dr. Scott Douglas with the strategy and policy department And so to give you an idea of what might be immediately relevant to this discussion are longer bios like all bios are available on the web I've been at the the war college for 11 years as a civilian professor But I'm also a naval intelligence officer in the reserves no prior active duty service before commissioning Deployed once to Iraq in 2009-10 and then went as a civilian advisor a war college advisor to Afghanistan So I have a perspective as a a civilian strategic studies professional As a reservist and then as a at different point in my life on active duty or a veteran of the wars We've been fighting all of that. I think you'll see in some ways colors my comments So we I think for the benefit of the crowd what you missed while you were out Getting your lunch was we all had a lunch and we began a I think a very interesting conversation In the interest of getting the most out of the time we have I'll just flag There are some areas where I violently agree With ball areas where I think there's unexplored tension and we could potentially go further and then I'll identify and start with the area Where I most disagree potentially violently disagree, but we'll see I think to start with it It was it was a bit of an intellectual roller coaster for me sitting through the presentation Which is what every good presentation should do there should do part be parts where you're nodding in agreement And then suddenly if you're not paying close attention things turn and then you want to find out the why and dig down into What the individual is thinking and I want to commend Paul for sharing this this is An opening field for him any cities wide open through the discussion and to have the courage to come and stand before this audience and throw Out some provocative ideas and seek those those points where there may be tension if you were to look at the checklist when it you got to the point about a all Soldiers veterans and citizens should be entitled to having their medical needs met check completely agree There are some nuances I think I could throw in about the the way the United States system works in my own opinion about the VA and how there is Something I would call you an explicit sacred covenant in the VA's founding that it refers to but that's that's a minor thing That adds richness and dimension and I can come back to that if folks are interested The second thing about where it came in Q&A towards the end about are we not special are we not better than the rest of society? In my opinion, we have to have a self-narrative that we are held to higher standards And it's in our interest to do so both corporately and individually and there's a strategic implication to that So in some sense, yes, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard That's a place of moderate potential disagreement, but I'll also flag and set that aside where I disagree most it was where it ended up and With the discussion that if you're in a no disadvantage model Then you are equally entitled to exercising your sovereign judgment about whether or not this is a war You should be involved in or whether you disagree at the policy and so forth in a view you have an exit right there I profoundly disagree and I'll pick up with the The conversation or the question that came from the audience about the Powell Weinberger doctrine I do not think as professionals you are entitled to insist on the Powell Weinberger doctrine That you have a special right and responsibility But within that your portion of the civil military dialogue is fairly constrained. So let me start with that I think part of the problem is the idea that the choice that's being presented to me intellectually intellectually is no disadvantage or citizen plus and then there was some discussion of citizen minus and I think That's very useful for capturing potentially the benefits discussion and the ethical standards discussion I don't think it captures the civil military dialogue dimension and there I was wrestling with what do I call it? Is it citizen soldier? Is it citizen sailor? Is it and then I finally came back to its profession of arms It's the concept of professionalism that I think that gives us a distinction there And that's where I would see a no disadvantage model versus a profession of arms model My clear preference is profession of arms and that no disadvantage is actually Going to undercut the liberal order that you're seeking to defend in the long run So let me start with profession of arms where I would come back to that is for me It starts with the concept of the military as a profession that Samuel Lonyton put forward in his book soldier in the state Being a professor. I had a copy upstairs and to your great good fortune. You're gonna hear his words not mine So I went back and and looked at the the part of the book that struck me the most and there it is Chapter one at the beginning authorship as a profession And he says the modern officer of course a professional body and the modern military officer a professional man So he says man not person because he's writing in the 50s But I think you can take that to apply to people of both genders and sexes This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of this book and then from there flows the rest of his work So that it's a profession of arms and then he goes on is who you need to define what a profession is a profession is a peculiar type of functional group with highly specialized characteristics Sculptors, stenographers, entrepreneurs and advertising copywriters all have distinct functions, but no one of these functions is professional in nature Professionalism distinguishes the military officer of today from the warriors of previous ages And that's where I think the ethical dimension comes in what sets of apart someone who's a professional of arms versus a warrior Versus a regular citizen. So those are the two poles I have the no disadvantage citizen The warrior and then the military professional in the middle. He gives you three things that creates the concept of profession So I'm skipping ahead a bit. I'm not gonna read you every word I encourage you to read the the original in its full The first step in analyzing professional character of the modern officer course to define Professionalism and then stinging characteristics of a profession as a special type of vocation are its expertise responsibility and corporateness so expertise I think it's fairly easy to to wrap your head around but you are professional in the management of violence That is the special prerogative the special tasks the society has given you and you spend a lifetime of professional learning thus the joint professional military education program Getting ever deeper and ever better at exercising the specialized body of knowledge from the tactical to the operational to the strategic to the grand strategic and so forth Moving on to responsibility here. We enter some different ground with the no disadvantage model The idea that Huntington sets out is that military professionals are like lawyers and like doctors and analogy that he uses to to quite some depth in the idea that you demand Something from society in return for the benefit of being the sole provider of a function to society so he takes the concept of Doctors and says look you have a professional ethic. It is first do no harm and These the the state is willing to charter you and your professional body to deliver this function for the good of the population writ large It also says that direct enumeration your benefits, etc. Are only a partial calculus of what the professional serves for They serve as to be part of the function, but he's quite explicit. He says look That this is also something that that's that's half done on the margins half done with quite understandings and half Hashed out in public forums, but it's and that's three halves if you're adding so his math is a bit better than mine But we go through it and he says it look it's not the same as the bargain You would strike with a contractor and that is a distinction. I do want to drive because I see the no disadvantage model In essence building a force that is contractors and having served a side alongside contractors I see a profound distinction between a military contractor and a military professional And if you monetize and make everything contractual you'll end up with contractors and not military professionals Okay, so you have this this special responsibility ours is to exercise judiciously The right to take lives in defense of a higher political goal In so doing it's incidental that you risk your own life I would actually put the premium on what sets you apart is your ability to take lives The risk of your own life is something that that happens incidental to that and if done well you may not be risking your life You may be killing people Remotely using unmanned aerial vehicles from halfway around the world and not at all be at risk That does not make you a non-professional. It simply means that we put the focus on the wrong bit Society tends to gravitate towards the part where you risk your own life But the the other part of the responsibility is corporateness where the profession demands the right to Organize and adjudicate its own members to hold its own members to a different set of standards and decide who does and who doesn't belong Reject people decide who is a licensed physician or who they will admit to the bar if you'll take a legal analogy And that that these bodies are in some way self-regulating. They're not sovereign. They're not distinct from the state They're self-regulating so they have a set of prerogatives that the state has given to them that sets them apart, but they're not wholly sovereign That wholly sovereign bit is what I want to get to in the political military dialogue a Citizen in my point of view is sovereign in your ability to speak up for your opinion about a political or the fitness of a particular policy Is it right to go to Iraq or Afghanistan? Are we doing the right thing versus ISIS, etc? You are sovereign in your ability to express whatever you want Those in the profession of arms are not sovereign in that respect. They are autonomous You undertake as part of your service Special restrictions because when people look at you they are in part seeing the reflection of your oath of office That special trust and confidence of the president that reposes in you and when you speak you cannot help But speak with a reflection of that authority and let me freely admit I made an error here I should have started by saying I'm Scott Douglas and the opinions You're about to hear of my own in a no way reflective of the United States government the US Navy and so forth But that that's more than a joke There's a reason why I should have done that and it was it was something of a minor lapse not to you is because I am Not speaking on behalf of the rest of you or the entire Naval War College or the Navy in that respect I'm offering my own professional academic opinion But if it would be wrong of me to go outside and say this is what the Navy thinks or this is the truth with The capital T to an audience that's not non attribution. That's not engaged in a free critical dialogue And there's a reason why we have a non attribution policy in here And that's where I draw the distinction with the the Powell Weinberger doctrine I went back and looked at the actual speech that the Weinberger gave He gave it in 1984. It's called the uses of military power PBS has it's on it on its website And it's fascinating because he lays out the injunctions that will later become known as the Powell Weinberger doctrine But he ends with a call to action and it's particularly interesting who he asked to take up his six items And make sure the nation lives by them and he says but policies and principles such as these require decisive leadership in both the executive and legislative branches of government and they also require strong sustained public support Most of all these policies require national unity of purpose and he was speaking to the National Press Corps So he intended to engage them as watchdogs in this effort And he said I believe the United States now possesses the policies and leaderships to gain the public support in unity And I believe the future will show we have the strength of care to protect these with peace and freedom However, where I think Powell aired is allowing his name to be associated with that while he is in uniform That it should not have become known as the Powell Weinberger doctrine while Powell was still wearing a uniform He could have freely expressed his opinion sternly behind closed doors to policy makers that says hey look We should only enter for vital national interest and only if you have a clear exit policy And I think that's what we should do in my professional judgment But when told thank you very much, but we're gonna go to Bosnia anyway Because it's in our best interest without a clear exit because it's what will advance in some amorphous way NATO unity and get us further along our goals, and that's our considered judgment from the National Command Authority He no longer had a position in my opinion to publicly say but wait Let me talk about the Powell Weinberger doctrine that that should not have come out He should have as as secretary Powell later absolutely as General Powell at the time no And that that's where I think there are some civil military lines, and that's where I think there is a distinct Onus on you as a professional in the the profession of arms to forthrightly speak your your mind behind closed doors But you are constrained and you are not a no disadvantaged citizen in that respect so let me in there because I think that's the Part where we probably had the most stark differences and turn it over to Lindsay Okay, good Scott reminded me to put my disclaimer up front the views expressed here on my own They do not represent those of the Department of the Navy or the United States government So There were a couple of things on which I wanted to engage Professor Robinson But there are also just a few empirical notes that I wanted to throw out first of all We so my co-authors and I have a chapter coming out very soon that looks at some survey Research on the US culture the US society and the US military And we do in fact find increasing evidence of both a sense of entitlement among military personnel and a sense of deference among civilians in other words a sense that civilians look at the military as people whom they should Grant all of these sort of special privileges and people who deserve these special privileges and that has increased since 1999 which was the end of the first survey so before 2001 So there is evidence of an increase in the in both of these attitudes in American in the American context And I think that's interesting We also know that From psychology, etc. That there is a need for sort of in-group cheerleading, right? There is a need for in-group cheerleading to make your group more cohesive to make you more effective at what you do Especially if you need high levels of motivation to do what you do It's important to sit around telling yourselves among yourselves that you are awesome and better than everybody else That's that's a reality and as one of the questioners pointed out before We also have a great deal of evidence that both military personnel in the United States and Civilians think that civilian culture in the US is pretty degraded That's a belief right now is that evidence that it is in fact degraded and that military personnel are in fact more ethical than civilians no But there is a widespread belief More widespread among military personnel than among civilians, but there there is a significant proportion of civilians who answer questions like Civilian society would be better off if it adopted more of the military's values and customs Now that was a question that we asked and there were you know 40% of the civilian non-veteran elite said they agree strongly with that So this is this is a difficult situation if you want to look at the models that professor Robinson brought up Right because there are a lot of perceptions That are very difficult to change So what do we do about this is one of the questions I would like to post to you is what do we do if you have a situation that Lots of people both in the military and outside of it actually think that civilian culture is degenerate I mean Tom Ricks is 1997 book Making the core followed platoon of young Marine Corps enlistees who went through boot camp, which is of course the most Traumatic experience that they're that they're likely to have at the beginning there and then they went home on leave before they went to their specialty schools and they had these Experiences where they were like gosh all my friends are smoking pot and watching TV and they're all fat And they drink lots of beer and gosh these people are just slobs. I don't want to be like them So and and that narrative really caught on during the 1990s That's why we did this survey in fact is because of that narrative So it'd be interesting to hear your thoughts on what you do with that situation and also The fact that and you pointed this out that we that we constantly tell our military personnel That we hold them to a higher standard than civilians We constantly tell you all that we expect you to be more ethical that we expect you to be more self-controlled that we expect you to Be more selfless than normal people, right? And I think you brought up the fact that you don't think you don't think we should be saying that but I wonder What you think we should be staying saying instead if this perception persists that you know well The only other option is being a fat drunken slob And then Another another issue that I thought was very interesting. So my my research is cross-national I do focus on the American case, but I look at other OECD countries. So mostly in Europe And also Australia, New Zealand, Canada And the US is unique in some ways There are some ways in which the United States Is unique in its economic system Professor Robinson pointed out that there is a difference in terms of the welfare Systems available to people in the United States We do not provide a lot of these benefits to anybody except military personnel In some cases benefits are provided purely on the basis of your employment status In other cases you have to provide benefits yourself. I'm thinking of for example child care Health insurance is usually employer provided Americans are expected to plan for their own retirement You might get a 401k But if you're a high school graduate like most of our enlisted personnel You are probably not working a job with a 401k. You probably don't get any paid vacation Which if you're an enlisted man in the US military you get 30 days including weekends. I get that right? But That's still 22 days of paid vacation. That's more than twice what the average American worker gets right So there are ways in which The citizen plus model that you talk about has actually been codified into legislation in this country And it's possible and I would argue that that has a lot to do with the fact that Those benefits are really attractive to high quality employees and that's who we want in the military And that's the only way the military can compete with other employers is to offer these benefits Whereas in countries like Germany or Norway or Sweden that have national health care very affordable child care very generous pensions Lots of paid vacation the military doesn't offer those benefits people in the military are exactly like everyone Because everyone gets those benefits. So I would just be interested to hear your thoughts on What what do you do about a situation in which there is economic necessity involved and in which this citizen plus model has Essentially been codified into legislation Okay, thank you to to Scott and to Lindsay you have some you have some bright people working here So it's nice to have this conversation Okay, so power Weinberg adoption, okay, so Viewers soldiers sailors and whatever have a right to insist on the power Weinberg adoption Well, not necessarily on that specifically, but I would say Probably you do have a right to insist on Just wars Otherwise if you don't why an earth did Martin cook come and give you a lecture all about it Like I mean if you're sad Bellum is none of your business Then he's wasting his time coming here speaking to you about it. In fact, he's Messing you up, right because he's teaching you stuff Which is not your business to know and encouraging you to think about things you should not be thinking about okay, so No military profession can be I think he's right to speak to you about it Because no profession of any sort can be divorced from its its higher end, right? So you don't judge the cop a Surgeon by whether he's good at cutting people up. I mean you could judge him that way I mean whether he's technically good at cutting people up, right? But the guy who's cutting them up for some cost of a Albanian organ running Thing it is not really morally on the power with someone who's doing it to get rid of cancer, right? Why you're cutting people up matters Okay, so to you as military people why you are using violence Is an essential part of your profession? So if we're gonna talk about the military profession like why you are doing what are you are doing is part of what it means to be a professional? And I think Martin and others said this in the army book which came out about 15 20 years ago on the army as a profession So I Think that in a in a modern world where people have access to to information and they're highly educated and And you're encouraging to think about what their profession is then it doesn't make sense to tell them that name was completely Abandoned all intellectual moral thought about the ill use of their profession And therefore I all I'm trying to say is that this should be some way out for those who? Determined that their profession is being ill used I was interested in the distinction you made between like Professionals and warriors I did write a piece of years back where I denounced the use of the term warrior I really don't like the term warrior and If the particularly the US Army could get rid of the warrior stuff and go back to go back to being professionals I think it would be um We don't really want warriors we want People who are much more than warriors But that's just a particular personal gripe of mine So are we sovereign or ultimately you know If I put this in crazy religious terms everyone has to care about his own soul and everyone is ultimately morally sovereign Whatever profession they're in I think that's Something in a liberal democratic society. We should not be taking away from people Onto to Lindsay is civilian culture. I don't believe civilian culture is degraded so so Under some of you may have read Stephen Pinker's book or maybe not. It's like this way thick. It's huge The better late better angels of our nature. You're not It's really a study of the history of violence and how much why there's so much less violence now than they used to be And one of the things Pinker says is basically we're better now Human beings are up their manners are better They're more tolerant of one another No more intelligent no more liberal. They're just nicer Right. Um, so actually modern, you know modern society is not degraded. One side actually by is pretty good Yeah, there's crime and so on but you know really by historical standards I think it is it is not right to say Maury It's degraded my students all you know incredibly liberal people who want to go off and save the world and you know build huts in Africa and stuff like that and The idea that somehow, you know, you're better than them and no, I mean there's What we should Lindsay ask, you know, what should be saying to him if not better What I think what what you should be saying is okay. Your job has certain functional demands Okay, you need to be physically courageous to be in the military where you don't to be a to be a professor Right, so we demand that you be physically courageous All right, and we demand that you study your profession and we demand this bad in the other, right? We demand a degree of obedience, but we don't And discipline and we demand you turn up on time, right? My admin staff like me because I'm the only person who ever hands in anything on time Which is just you know, like professors don't do that, you know, unless they were in the military when they do But in the military you've got to turn up five minutes early, right? Oh, yeah, five minutes early for the five minutes early, which the sergeant major said you've got to be five minutes early for You know how it goes. Okay, so so there are demands of your profession. So what do we need to be teaching peers? Okay, so what is it required? What does being a good soldier in both a practical and moral sense mean? And this is what we want you to be for for those reasons more generally what we can we do? Well, what can Americans do since they have to give all these benefits given the benefits don't exist Well, I don't become more socialist But Bernie Sanders or something. I don't know Obviously become like Canada we'd say if you were Canadian, you know, we'll look at you down here and go what's up with them, you know Shake our heads and slight bemusement No, well, yeah, but hop see we just operate my harper is you know by our standards very right wing But actually by your standards and probably on the left of the Democratic Party or something so You know so Yeah, I mean you completely change the way you run your sister state, but that's not really practical is it? So I'm not sure I know actually I don't have a very good answer to that one if I could just come back to that I mean I I'm very sympathetic to your argument, you know, especially the these sort of ethical implications of your argument I just in a practical sense I'm not sure what we can do about the fact that in and again I was not saying that civilian society is in fact degenerate simply that many Civilians perceive their own society as being degenerate and that many military personnel also perceive that society as being degenerate now Is that maybe a function of not? Reading enough about You know how people actually are I don't know but but there is a perception issue there And also your point about you know, there are certain things that we require you to do I mean one of the things that we require military personnel to do not all of them, right? But many of them and many of them don't know At their initial obligation or during their initial training whether they will have this function or not But we ask you to use lethal force responsibly and under frequently morally ambiguous conditions Etc. Etc. And that that requires a certain amount of Moral and ethical judgment and training and and sort of Higher standards than than many other things do so I was wondering if you could address that Yeah, I get a point about It's not really but civilian culture is degraded as people think it's degraded and what we do about that Um Again, I'm gonna say I don't particularly know how we can change perspectives of that sort except I Really cringe when I hear these politicians saying You know, I think and kind of you know, you're Canada's finest, you know, and I was a military spouse You know military families are the best citizens in Canada. It's like You know, why do they say this stuff and why do we encourage them to say this stuff? so if people could just shut up like and not keep saying that it might do something to Address that particular issue, but it's a whole societal problem. So I I'm not sure I don't have a good answer But I could jump a to follow quickly and then transition back to the the part where we were we were disagreeing about Shouldn't be divorced in society and you should be listening to just war theory if you're if you're a professional with the other part a Agree, but I think it's peculiar that you're the instances that you quote where you have problems with it It's politicians saying that and then the audience for Changing the taste with which people frame things is a political one And it should be addressed to society writ large rather than this room here And I think one of the reasons why that persists is because the military is suitably quiet And then therefore politicians speak in their name But this that military has to stay suitably quiet because again the cure for going after and quashing misperceptions Is worse than the disease because then you begin to speak with the authority of the of the corporation writ large And you're not in a position to do that So concerns about whether politicians to say Canada's finest or America's finest that's a conversation beyond I think the Realms of this this room or the walls of this room But let me go back to the one about should we teach you just war theory Isn't it at the core of your responsibility? Yes, which is why I have a problem with the no disadvantaged model Because versus the citizen plus the profession of arms models would simply say you're a citizen and then on top of that You have a set of obligations as a professional But coming professional doesn't mean you cease being a citizen And so if you decide that your duties as a citizen to not let your country get involved in something you think it is Immoral then that in that trumped your obligations as a professional Shed the uniform and make your case in a position that is no more privileged than any other citizen Where I have an issue with it is because of the special trust and confidence section of that It is assumed that if you stay in service and willingly accept a paycheck and wear a uniform show up to drill if you're a reservist or Show up to work if you're an active duty member when called to go to a war zone That is not the time to suddenly say I've changed my mind However, that is a better time to exit than mid stride during deployment where I think you have even fewer rights For dissension that you should have decided whether it was compatible with your major own ethical stand Is it compatible with my ideas of what I think we should be doing as a citizen? Beforehand in that case the profession of arms isn't divorced from society It's set partly apart from it like all professions are in this weird negotiated space Just like doctors are mandated reporters if someone comes and reports child abuse They can't keep it private even if it's socially disastrous Attorney-client privilege is something that we have to respect Because of that profession Lawyers have to be a zealous defender of whatever client they're assigned whether or not they personally like the individual Press a Reporters have been arguing for a long time that they're professionals and then we should respect the confidentiality of their sources All of those have times where they've come a cropper with society and there have been debates about what are the proper limits on them? but that's a negotiated space and I think that's where you don't have the same right to defend Descent while wearing the uniform that you would as a civilian and the reasons why is it? It implies whilst to wearing a uniform and voicing that descent that you have a privileged moral high ground or a greater access in that case I'm sympathetic with your original starting point that you don't want to deprive citizens of their due But I think allowing people in uniform to dissent and say as a military professional I think this is wrong and I'm not getting out of uniform Or I so disagree with this policy that I'm going to stay in uniform and then actively obstruct what we're trying to do That privileges their point of view above that of other citizens and actually deprives other citizens of equal footing If you have if your duties as a citizen trumps that of your professional Doth the uniform become a citizen and debate on equal terms with everyone else in the marketplace of democratic ideas Thank you, Scott. I don't actually have a huge difference of opinion with you except that the way Most Western military when most militaries in the world operate you do not have a legal method of Doffing your uniform unless your Term of contract is up, right? So If you about to be deployed to Iraq and you say I think it's an unjust war. I'm resigning. They'll say no, you're not Well, at least you cannot, you know, they might secretly Dusted under the carpet and let you anyway But if they decide not to it was nothing you can do about it. You have no legal Method of taking that option. There are one or two countries where you can you can do it in Germany You can do it in Australia if you're a conscript. I Think you can maybe do it in benevolence too But United States Canada bring most other countries you can't so, you know, it's fine in theory But in practice, we we don't allow people that option if we do allow it. It's unofficially It's up to the whim of the commanding officer So there's no actual written-down method where you can practice that form of exit Actually, let me let me come back on that and and say at this point I'm switching from the academic portion of my life to the reserve portion of my life and There's a reason why I start every drill weekend and this is a unique perspective because you have people who are citizens Almost all the time and then only imperfectly Transition to the military mindset. There's a reason why I start the drill weekend with the sailors creed which embodied in it says I will You know, I'll obey the orders of those appointed over me, which is a reiteration reminder at the beginning This is an obligation. You're taking if you have an issue with this Then you need to be frank about that now and then we're frank about hey if you're in the reserves You're going to get mobilized Almost as a certainty within a set amount of time If you don't feel as compatible with your life, let me know now if someone decides after I've told them Hey, we just go to order for your mobilization and they say I'm not going which the cases happened, but not to me That becomes a leadership issue. It doesn't mean I'd instantly throw them in jail. It means that Rather than make a rule for this person to continue to exit It is something that we have to to learn how to negotiate and it becomes a discussion between that person and the larger military body That and I move this on to higher headquarters They address that and there I don't think you can really point to Other than maybe the one instance that we discussed at lunch about a person refusing to go to Iraq But would go to Afghanistan Folks who have been court martial for going AWOL before if you leave in a combat zone it's entirely different because of the consequences to to The comrades in the mission so there is a negotiated space for that But it's I would rather have it be a negotiated procedure It's a little disingenuous to say that hey, there's no way to handle that You'll go straight to jail and it's black and white and there's no way for people to dissent. They do I think it's disingenuous or do more harm to create an exit option at the last moment that was rigorous and open If people decided to stay in uniform all along there are exit options earlier that are to their benefit Can I jump in on this? Okay so I want to Reframe this a little bit in in political science We usually talk about the relationship between the society and the government and the government and the military as a nested principle agent relationship, right? You've got the society Sorry, you've got the society as the principle and they designate a government agent That's supposed to act on their behalf and carry out their wishes as expressed through elections, etc And then the government designates an organization as its agent to act in execution of its orders Based on this whole system of democratic governance the laws that say this is how we know that these are the legitimate representatives of the people etc, etc and I think that one of the reasons that there are so few countries that allow Selective conscientious objection is precisely because the theory is that the government is the legitimate representative of the people and when you Take a commission or when you enlist you are basically saying I am going to be an officer of the government I'm going to execute the government's lawful orders and And this is sort of supposedly in theory at least the way that democratic theory goes from the people to the Executing body, so how how do you see and I know that what you're saying is that if you disagree you should exit You should leave your office as an officer of the government and become a citizen again and and exercise your Influence over the government that way, but do you not think that that that kind of option would weaken the very idea of Taking an oath in the first place Well What depends what? Oaths are difficult and American things take these a lot more seriously than Canadians But we saw an oath to the Queen has and successes and to obey them But the Ontario Superior Court recently declared that this was not actually an oath to the Queen at all This is a the Queen just means the values of Canadian society according to the Ontario Superior Court This is because someone didn't want to swear allegiance to the Queen some Republican and I was told no you have to swear allegiance to the Queen I want to suggest this to some British officers who shot back. No, it's for Queen But officially it's not in recent Canada, it's the values. So what we're swearing allegiance to is the values of the society and If the what you're being told to do is in breach of the values of the society Then arguably you have a duty to put the values of society above legal orders In fact the Canadian defense Department of National Defense actually issued about ten years ago a statement of Canadian defense ethics which said that military personnel have three obligations They have obligations to The values of Canadian society they have obligations to legal authority and I can't remember the third one and then they said they come in that order Very interesting phrasing and I know the person who wrote this and I think he slipped it past the Chief of Defense staff I thought the Chief of Defense staff quite realizing what he'd signed but it's there an official statement of Canadian defense ethics that Canadian values come above legal orders. So You know that It's a bit little bit more complicated than I think you're saying I'm not saying you know, obviously you don't want everybody saying Oh, I think this is wrong. I'm not gonna do it all the time because that's not gonna work But there are cases when Sometimes you have you have to do what you're gonna you've got to do, you know and It doesn't seem right that in a professional organization you would deal with this through unofficial administrative murky subjective Procedures which will vary from person to person and be highly dependent upon the character of those involved rather than on some Officially recognized procedure and once of course the moment you have officially recognized procedure There's no issue at all about disobeying orders or not obeying legal authority because you're exercising a legally mandated opting out close, but I think we're moving a little bit away from From our original topic here, so so as tempting as it is to take the debate and go further on UCMJ and the fact that we actually have codified the squishy in the military with the fact you have administrative procedures You have non-judicial punishment which by its title tells you there's discretion and as that as a service culture in the Navy in particular has made a An item out of command discretion and authority so the very thing that you're saying seems squishy We've all we've said that's something we pride ourselves on rather than follow that that route I think there's plenty that I think you all have in the audience enough tools in your own professional background to take that and debate it further in Seminar and we're fairly time-pressed I wanted to ask actually Lindsay if she could pivot to one of the interesting frameworks that came up at lunch when we were talking about the The entitlements framework and Lindsay you came up with a very interesting way of framing where you said there were four specter You were looking at the the social the ethical the professional in the the fiscal I think So wonder if you could explain that and that might frame us to hit the last topic of entitlements before we run out of time here Sure Before we do that though, I just want to throw out a really interesting again survey result Which is that when we asked American military personnel and American civilians in 1999 Whether if they were given an unwise order, they should carry it out or do some other form of resistance The military personnel were very highly likely to say if you're given a stupid order, you should do it Anyway, the civilians on the other hand said no no no you should resist that then we asked them What would you do if we were given an order that was legal but immoral and the military officers? overwhelmingly said that they would try to find some way to persuade to Resist even if it meant court martial etc. The civilians said well you should totally just carry that out So it was really interesting It's a very interesting thing, okay, but the the framework that Scott was talking about I Was I was interested in Professor Robinson's idea of the Citizen Plus and the notice advantage model Because I think there are multiple dimensions on which you could have that model and the four that I was thinking of One for one of which I'm indebted to dr. Blankshane who's also here Are the the social model so you can either soldiers and military service members might either be Stigmatized or they might be highly desirable Social interlocutors Depending on sort of the social view of military service There's the political realm where military advice military endorsement military approval might be a really important or a Desirable thing or it might be the other way There's the legal realm right what rights do military personnel have so in some ways military personnel have fewer rights than normal citizens Freedom of speech freedom of movement for example But in other ways as I pointed out you have more rights than normal citizens and that's true in in several countries And then there's the fiscal the one that that Professor Robinson really talked about the benefits side of things and It's interesting. I think too and this is a totally empirical question I don't know the answer to this it seems to me that those four dimensions could all vary the same direction if you have a Society that views military service is very bad or very good But it's also possible that the fiscal dimension could be used to offset Negatives in the other dimensions in other words if you have a highly stigmatized military You might need to pay them more in order to get people to do it Right, so I think it would be interesting to do more research on that question to kind of find out what's going on there But I think we should let Professor Robinson have the last word on that Yeah, I think it could be something for that it could be that some of us you know support our troops stuff and so on is a compensation for other things I Wonder though whether there are cases of low status professions being highly paid. It's normally It's not these things normally do tend to go together your high status and high pay and You either you fall and fairly consistently into one bracket or the other And although you know in surveys people might say I don't trust lawyers. I trust soldiers more very much Discussing you know much rather your son was a lawyer than a soldier possibly because they earn a lot more and in reality the lawyers have higher status in Despite the fact you don't go around with I support my lawyer stickers You know And it's interesting my wife's a lawyer. She used to be in the military. She's now a lawyer I joke she went from the most respected to the least respected profession in the country. All right So and she says according to surveys actually if you ask people whether they trust lawyers Overwhelmingly say they say no if you ask them whether they trust their lawyer Overwhelmingly they say yes So, you know these surveys Don't tell part of the story. We have the same issue with congressmen So I we'd like now to open it up for question and answer. We have half an hour We'll be stopping at 1430, but the floor is yours