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ABSTRACT
The United States Army's current doctrinal ethical decision making model is unsuited for current military operations and provides little basis for ethical challenges in military operations today. This paper describes the current doctrinal ethical decision making model and proposes a pragmatic model that integrates three approaches to ethics: principles based ethics, consequences based ethics, and virtues based ethics.
BACKGROUND
In May 1968 soldiers of Charlie Company, 11th Infantry Brigade of the Americal Division entered the village of My Lai in Vietnam and within three hours over 500 civilians had been massacred. This horrible memory of the United States Army at war was again remembered in 2004 as the case of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq exposed atrocities that continue to be an embarrassment for the military. The war in Iraq has also had a number of high profile cases that relate to ethical behavior, such as the court-martial for six reservists w ho had "scrounged" vehicles to deliver supplies to troops in the field and the scene of a marine reacting to a perceived threat and subsequently killing an unarmed Iraqi prisoner in a mosque in Fallujah.
In all of these cases, the public has had widely different opinions of how to treat the military involved in the incidents. For Lieutenant Calley and those involved in My Lai, many in the public viewed the actions of Charlie Company as understandable because of the nature of the war in 1968 - everyone seemed to be the enemy, and the "search and destroy" missions of that time were based upon intelligence that indicated the enemy was using hamlets such as My Lai for refuge. As a result, the punishment for all of those involved in My Lai was very light or nonexistent; Lieutenant Calley was the only one convicted but he only served three days in prison and was pardoned by President Nixon after serving three and a half years on "house arrest" (Appy 2004). For the recent cases in Iraq, the reaction has been mixed in the public, from widespread support for the marine in Fallujah and the reservists who "scrounged" vehicles, to disgust at the Abu Ghraib cases and calls for the courts-martial to go higher up the chain of command....