In Chapter 2, we address the ethics of raids, those daring, made-for-Hollywood missions like Operation Neptune Spear, the raid to capture/kill Osama bin Laden. Often characterized as ’high risk, high reward’ missions, we consider the moral challenges that that phrase implies. Do big payoffs justify rule-bending or rule-breaking? And who shoulders the high risk? The operators themselves, of course. But do promises of a big payoff justify placing non-combatants at additional risk? And what if that big payoff is a specific person as was the case in the bin Laden raid? As a discipline, military ethics has focused its attention primarily on contests between nameless combatants. It has paid scant attention, relatively speaking, to state-sponsored operations to hunt down and kill a specific person. Is this ever morally permissible? If so, under what conditions? What are the crimes that warrant a death sentence pronounced by a foreign government? Must a state first exhaust reasonable attempts to capture the named target? Does the method of execution matter ethically?

Chapter 1 serves three purposes. First, it introduces the principal question that grounds this volume: Is there something ethically special about special operations? Should special operators be constrained by the same moral framework that guides conventional military operations, or is there something inherent in special operations that justifies setting aside legal and normative restraints? The second goal of Chapter 1 is to establish a common understanding of what makes special operations and SOF distinct from conventional operations and general purpose forces. Finally, before we can assess how special operations trouble the rules of war that govern conventional military operations, we will need to outline in broad terms what these rules are. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the just war tradition.

In Chapter 5, we reflect on the ethical challenges of irregular warfare. In special operations doctrine, irregular warfare most often involves working ’through, with or by’ foreign guerrillas (unconventional warfare) or foreign counter-guerrilla forces (foreign internal defence). Engaging in armed conflict through proxies can seem like a cheap and low-risk option to policy-makers, but it also contains the potential for conflicts of interest and priorities inherent in all principal–agent relationships. If a powerful state (the principal) feels it has achieved its war aims, can it simply withdraw from a fight in which their proxies (the agent) and their SOF partners are still engaged? Likewise, proxies have incentives to mislead sponsor states as to their capabilities, intentions, and commitment to ethical warfighting. To what extent are SOF morally accountable for the ethical conduct of the foreign combatants whom they advise?

In our concluding chapter, we refocus our attention on the individual SOF operator. A career, or even a deployment, in special operations exposes operators to an exceptionally high risk of post-traumatic stress and moral injury. We argue that states, therefore, have an obligation to ’ethically armour’ their special operators against moral injury, a battlefield hazard that is just as deadly as a sniper’s bullet. Leaders at every level must ensure that SOF are educated and trained in the moral complexity of their profession. Given the emergence of SOF power as an essential instrument of statecraft, the political sensitivity that is often a feature of special operations, and the independent and improvisational decision-making that is necessary for special operations to succeed, a casual acquaintance with the ethics of their craft is insufficient. As with other skillsets that SOF are required to master, mastery in the ethics of special ops must be the standard.

In Chapter 3, we turn to recoveries, a state’s efforts to repatriate its citizens held by a hostile power or at risk of being captured. Aphorisms like ’we leave no one behind’ or ’we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ seem honourable and even righteous. Yet military operations to recover either prisoners of war (e.g., the 1970 US Special Forces raid of the Son Tay POW camp in North Vietnam) or hostages (e.g., the 1980 British SAS rescue of hostages taken at the Iranian Embassy in London) typically involve significant risk to the rescuers, non-combatants who may be in the vicinity of a rescue operation, and even the hostages or prisoners themselves who are sometimes killed in the crossfire. Ethically speaking, how should we weigh those risks against alternatives such as payment of a ransom or a negotiated prisoner exchange?

Chapter 4 examines reconnaissance operations. Reconnaissance seems, prima facia, to be the least problematic of the special operations mission set from an ethical perspective. Intelligence gathering is universally acknowledged as a legitimate operation in war and peace. Done well and according to plan, reconnaissance missions involve no loss of life and often provide information that enables more discriminate targeting. But reconnaissance operations conducted by SOF, ’special reconnaissance (SR)’, often involve peculiar moral risks. SR missions are typically carried out over a long duration, deep in unfriendly territory, and with limited or tenuous means of support available. If a SOF reconnaissance team is compromised, the consequences are particularly pernicious. Given that compromise could result in mission failure, national embarrassment, imprisonment, or death, are there moral limits to what SOF teams can do to prevent detection? For example, are SR teams ever justified in killing, detaining, or otherwise harming non-combatants to avoid discovery? Wearing camouflage is generally accepted as ethically unproblematic, but what about the practice of ’hiding in plain sight’ by falsifying personal identification, donning local garb, or even dressing in the uniform or distinctive clothing of the enemy? At what point does concealment of identity become perfidy?

In Chapter 6, we shift our focus from the individual to the unit level of analysis and consider the ethics of special operations through the lens of statecraft. Specifically, we consider a leader’s decision to employ SOF outside of an ongoing conflict, violating the political sovereignty and territorial integrity of a state with which the aggressor is nominally at peace. What moral framework should guide such a decision? The jus ad bellum convention sets an appropriately high bar for states to justify their decisions to use military force. But should the same high bar we apply to a full-scale war in which tens of thousands may perish also apply to a leader’s decision to launch a stand-alone special operations raid in which maybe a half-dozen people will be killed? What if that leader believes that a discrete application of SOF power now will prevent full-scale war later? Chapter 6 explores how states employ SOF as a force-short-of-war option, the tensions that arise when applying ad bellum principles to these operations, and the advantages and risks inherent in adopting distinct convention for force short of war – a jus ad vim convention – as an alternative to jus ad bellum.

This chapter takes up the pursuit of the global war on terrorism, as the Pentagon deploys small teams of Special Operations Forces, who work with CIA professionals and State Department or Agency for International Development officials to contain the spread of terrorist groups in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These mini-conflicts focus on counterterrorism operations where the US Green Berets or other SOFs work “by, with, and through” local partners to combat terrorists/insurgents fighting under the banner of Salafi jihadism. They train, mentor, and equip locally recruited fighters to act as force multipliers for the US detachments of between 500 and 700 personnel in each country. Underpinning this form of warfare are high-tech surveillance, along with airstrikes from drones, helicopters, and missiles. American forces have proven to be masters of eliminating key terrorist facilitators, bomb makers, and clerics who foment violent extremism. They have so far kept countries from being overrun by Islamist militants as partially took place in Syria and Iraq in 2014. While cost-effective in sparing America lives and financial expenditures, plus safeguarding the homeland and most allied countries from ravages of major terrorism, the small-footprint operations in remote non-Western lands have incurred rancor from journalists, pundits, and some elected officials. Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joseph Biden have campaigned and made moves to pullout US forces from what are termed “forever wars.”