‘Our values, who we are as a nation, who we are as a society, and who we are as soldiers in the army is an asymmetric advantage.’

BRIG James Davis, Director General, Future Land Warfare

The Army contributes expertise in land domain warfighting to the integrated force. But what does it mean to conduct warfighting in an ethical way? How can Army members preserve Defence values and make consistent ethical decisions in accord with those values? This is a tricky but crucial area.

For an overview, watch the video below:

Throughout 2024, a number of Cove contributors provided articles on this topic.

The Land Combat College (LCC) looks after the Army’s training on ethics, drawing on the expertise of other bodies such as the Centre for Defence Leadership and Ethics. Representing LCC, CAPT Ollie Palmer wrote an article providing an overall assessment of Army’s training for ethical decision making, titled The Current State of Ethical Decision Making in the Australian Army Training Context: Future Ready? This included an overview of ethical theories, a guide to the ADF ethical decision-making framework, and reflections on how Army might continue to foster an ethical culture.

We also brought to you the UQ/QUR Ethics Symposium, 2024, hosted by The University of Queensland and the Queensland University Regiment, where a wide range of expert speakers came together to discuss the contemporary challenges currently faced by practitioners in military ethics.

That written article is supplemented by two podcast episodes that The Cove conducted with guests from LCC and elsewhere. These wide-ranging episodes discussed real life battlefield problems encountered by Australian soldiers, as well as more philosophical questions such as, ‘Can a bad person be a good soldier?’ and ‘What happens when every option seems bad?’

The 2024 Cove Challenge was devoted to the topic of ethics, asking contributors to present an ethical issue that will be relevant in the next war. Entrants were able to respond to this prompt in either written or graphic form. You can find the written responses here and the graphic responses here.

We also received article submissions related to Ethical Decision Making from members. Darren Cronshaw contributed an article discussing the application of just war principles and the ethical challenges raised by the cyber domain in his book review of Cyber Warfare Ethics. Isaac Williams contributed an article contending that the overuse of Special Forces runs the danger of morally numbing soldiers: Ethics of Special Operations – Scared of Our Own Shadow.

The Cove has a number of Quick Military Education (QME) exercises, which can be used on the range, in the field, or in the barracks. In 2024 we added one on ADF values, which can be found here.