Maz:
We are living through an era where warfare is live-streamed and war crimes are documented in real time, yet accountability remains elusive. From the relentless siege of Gaza to the grinding attrition of Ukraine, we are witnessing not isolated abuses, but a pattern of impunity, of moral degradation, and of collapsing norms. International law is either ignored or manipulated, and nothing happens. Or worse, violations are rationalised and rewarded.

Today’s conversation is not just about the law, it’s about responsibility. Individual, institutional and global. To help us navigate this terrain, I’m joined by two of the world’s most respected voices in military ethics.

Dr. David Whetham, Professor of Ethics in the Military Profession at King’s College London and Director of the Center for Military Ethics. For over two decades, David has trained military officers from across the globe on how to apply ethical principles in the harshest conditions of war.

And Dr. Pauline Shanks Kaurin, now former Stockton Chair of Ethics at the US Naval War College and author of On Obedience. Pauline recently resigned her post in public protest, raising the alarm about the political pressures undermining honest ethical discourse within military institutions.

Both David and Pauline have appeared on The Voices of War before, and I’m honoured to welcome them back.

Pauline and David, welcome back to The Voices of War.

Pauline:
Thank you.

David:
Thank you very much, great to be back.

Maz:
So I know time is short and we’ve got lots to cover. So I’d like to dive straight in. I will add links to our previous episodes to the show notes of this episode. So we’ll skip the introductions this time because we’re witnessing two major wars, Gaza and Ukraine, where ethical norms seem to be collapsing. So from your perspective, what do these conflicts reveal about the current state of military ethics? And what, if anything, still restrains violence in war today? It’s always difficult when there’s two speakers, but perhaps given Pauline’s recent public resignation, maybe I’ll start with you, Pauline, because I think you have a lot to say about ethics, military ethics at the moment.

Pauline:
Yeah, so I think one way to look at it is everything is collapsing and what do we do? And we have, in my country, prominent politicians who are expressing scepticism, if not open hostility, to the laws of war, to the ideas of military ethics, to the idea of the military profession as we’ve understood it for the last 50 or 60 years. So, you know, I think it’s tempting to gnash our teeth and say everything is awful. Maybe David’s going to say that for me. But I’m constitutionally more optimistic. I do think what we’re seeing is a serious breakdown in permission structures. So I think in part because of social media and the way in which we can stream things live and now people can participate in a way, the time period has collapsed. So it was a year between the My Lai Massacre and the pictures appearing in Time magazine, right? So it’s not the case that atrocities have never been committed, have never been a matter of state policy, have never been something that have been disseminated or made public or being bragged about, but that time has collapsed, right? So we can see it instantly.

And I think some of the permission structures—I think Gaza and Ukraine are both what we might consider sort of smaller wars, right? With a mix of conventional, unconventional and all kinds of other things going on, including information warfare. So that narrative is really key to how people are fighting. And I think we see it with all the belligerents in both of those conflicts who have a vested interest in trying to sway public opinion or garner sympathy or horrify, like, let me convince you how bad I am by showing the things that I’m willing to do to win. So I think that’s part of what we’re seeing. I do think that’s a challenge for military ethics, but I don’t think it’s a wholesale collapse.

Pauline:
Perhaps they’re at a scale, especially in Gaza, that perhaps we haven’t seen before. These are not—like there’s not a lot of novel stuff in military ethics, right? So maybe the way it’s packaged or the people who have access to it, maybe that is changing, the conversation is changing. And the willingness of politicians to say—it used to be that you wanted to cover up your war crimes, right? And now it seems like you have some leaders who want to brag about that, who want to make it clear, like, yeah, I’m going to do this and hoping that that persuades the adversary to stop fighting or to sue for peace or so on, which doesn’t seem to have worked so far in my view.

Maz:
We’re contesting the meaning of war crimes as well. What do you think David? What’s your thoughts?

David:
It’s a huge topic, isn’t it? There’s so many different bits to unpack there. My note of caution with the everything’s terrible—it clearly is. There’s some terrible things going on. I think Pauline’s absolutely right to note that there’s plenty of history of this kind of behaviour. It’s not a 21st-century phenomenon.

War is an absolutely horrendous thing to engage in, which is precisely why you’re not supposed to enter into it lightly in the first place. You can only restrain it so far. But I do think it’s worth noting that the wholesale abandonment of the moral rules, the ethical norms and the laws—we’re not there yet, because even the perpetrators of some absolutely appalling behaviour, some state-sponsored atrocities—they’re not saying it’s okay to do this. They spend an awful lot of time and resources trying to demonstrate that they’re not doing what they’re doing a lot of the time. They’re using sophisticated media techniques to try and get their side of the story across, to justify their actions.

Invariably, it’s portrayed as necessary to try and justify those actions, or it’s simply made up by the other side who simply want to undermine the legitimacy of what would otherwise be a legitimate act. So if it really didn’t matter anymore, why on earth are states spending so much energy in trying to justify what they’re doing? If it genuinely doesn’t matter, that just doesn’t make sense. It clearly does matter. And that’s the real one of our challenges, I think.

Maz:
Interesting. I couldn’t agree more. I think it does matter. Where I’m having a conundrum personally is that it appears as though we’re living in this giant hypocrisy where on one hand, we’re trying to present an image of being righteous and noble. And then through these very narratives that you both described, we’re doing the most abhorrent things and justifying it by those same very narratives.

In my view, I find it difficult to reconcile how the West can recover its moral high ground—West broadly construed, right? Israel is part of that, I think. How it can regain its moral high ground when we’re justifying abhorrent behaviour through narratives of “it’s one-to-one casualty versus militant.” And then you dig below and ask the question, how did you define militant? Well, it’s done through AI, where anybody with this particular pattern of life is therefore considered a militant, right?

Which then brings me to the question—what does this do to our Jus in Bello principles, right? Of distinction, proportionality, even necessity—or let’s not even talk about humanity. And I guess that’s also my next question to you both. How do we then, given what we’re discussing—and if the situation is not as dire as you both suggest, which it might not be—but how do we then reconcile this battle of the Jus in Bello principles, which in my view, and perhaps I’m too far down a rabbit hole, are nothing but hypocrisy.

Whoever wants to take first, happy to make this a conversation rather than me pointing.

Pauline:
Well, I think the Jus in Bello constraints are certainly under pressure, and they’re always under pressure once you get into combat, as David said. That’s why you’re not supposed to do this. Like, this is why this is supposed to be last resort. So I think that’s one piece of it. And so the question is, you know, how do you engage in this?

There’s varying degrees of professionalisation in the militaries involved, right? And so that’s part of the issue. I think part of our shock though goes to the name of what you named the episode, which is the impunity piece. So I think there’s this sense that no one’s gonna be held accountable. So it’s not like war crimes can never happen, right?

Maz:
Mm.

Pauline:
But I think at least in the West, we have this idea—or we have this hope—that when these things happen, when My Lai happens, when Haditha happens, when whatever happens, that somehow there’s going to be some kind of public and/or legal and moral accountability so that the people involved will be hopefully punished, but at least there’ll be some kind of public reckoning and that there will be changes made in the military, as there were in the US military after Vietnam, right?

And that we will try not to do that stuff, and that for the people involved who don’t particularly like to follow the laws of war, we hope the accountability provides some deterrence or some shame or some other public way to hopefully restrain people at least a little bit next time around.

I think—to the degree that I’m bummed out, depressed, discouraged—it’s with the accountability thing. In part because public figures don’t necessarily seem—I mean, David is right—they are in some ways trying to justify what they’re doing, which suggests that they know that it’s wrong or will be perceived to be wrong. But it’s not clear. And maybe it’s just too early, right? Because both of these conflicts are, you know, three years or just a little over three years old in the case of the Ukraine war, right?

So it’s not clear what that accountability is going to look like—if it happens at all. And that typically doesn’t happen until after a conflict has concluded, right? So I wonder if that impunity—maybe that’s part of the feeling of impunity, right? So maybe that’s more of the vibes, if you will. But I think when I’m looking at what’s going on, like, that’s my—as military ethicists, that’s my, as Martha Nussbaum would say, transition anger—this righteous anger that no, it’s not okay.

We need to do something about this, because maybe we can’t stop what’s happening right now, but can we—when it comes to conclusion—can there be accountability? Can we learn something? Can we try to make sure that this doesn’t happen again? Which in part is the genesis of things like the Geneva and Hague Conventions, the Lieber Code—those kinds of things were attempts after a conflict to say, “Okay, y’all, that sucked. Let’s not do that again,” right?

Maz:
Hmm.

Pauline:
Okay, so it’s not perfect, but there is this attempt to say, can we learn something? And it’s never going to be perfection, because you’re dealing with human beings, right?

Maz:
My issue—I couldn’t agree more—and David, I’ll let you jump in in a second. My issue really, I think the more I think about it, is I sense narratives. It’s a competition of narratives and it’s the eternal battle between values versus interests. The IHL, Geneva Conventions, rules of law, war, international law in general is about values—where people came together after horrendous atrocities of, you know, World War II in this case.

And as you said, said, “Hey, this was not cool. Let’s figure out a way to do it.” But when those clash with interests—i.e. national interests—the way I perceive it is interests trump values at any point in time. Whether it’s the Australian military, whether it’s us joining—in an Australian Army context or military context—joining Afghanistan because it was about waving the flag to go with our ally, which is now publicly being disclosed as the reason we went to Afghanistan, our longest war.

It had nothing to do with values. We can mask it and stick labels on it and train our soldiers about, you know, it’s about democracy, doing the right thing, helping people. All of that gets trumped by interests because it was in Australia’s national interest to effectively go to war in support of another—which, whether we should have gone or not is irrelevant.

It’s just that the Jus ad Bellum and the Jus in Bello, the principles of military ethics that we hold so dear, in my view, are now merely an illusion. And that’s what I want to contest with you. And sorry, David, I jumped in there because I thought that was a neat way to bring in this tension of values with interest.

Pauline:
And before David jumps in, I’d just like to do the philosopher thing and clarify, Maz—whether you’re talking about short-term interests or long-term interests, because those are different things. And I would argue most politicians are very interested in the short-term and are not thinking about long-term. But I’ll just sort of leave that distinction hanging. And now David can clean it all up. Good job, David. Good luck.

Maz:
What a good question—especially democratic ones, right? Really good point. Yeah.

David:
Well, once again, many things to try and unpack there. I think there’s a reason we were talking about the ad Bellum side here—so the justification for going to war in the first place. There’s a reason that there’s a just cause and a right intention criteria there. And what you’ve just alluded to, Maz, is the difference between the public reason why you do something versus the actual reason why you do it.

And, you know, long in the history of the tradition, there’s a warning there—that if there’s a divergence between your stated reasons and your actual reasons, your actions are unlikely to be in accordance with your stated reasons. And you’re more likely to end up with—even if you’re successful—an unjust peace which simply sows the seeds for future conflict because it wasn’t about what you said it was, and the peace doesn’t match your stated reasons. Intention shapes action and that’s absolutely key.

So yes, the Just War tradition has long recognised some of those dangers. I think to some of the other points that have been raised though—we’re seeing a lack of confidence and a lack of political leadership in calling out clear violations of acceptable norms. And I think that is quite worrying. Now, that’s interests, that’s geopolitics, that’s… partly, it’s fear, I think.

There’s so many different conflicts going on in the world. We tend to concentrate on the two that tend to be higher up in our Western headlines—so Russia–Ukraine and Israel–Gaza. And those are the two dominating, but there is upwards of a hundred different conflicts going on at the moment. Most people are not even aware of the vast majority of those.

But even with those two, when something happens, it’s very hard for it to get public attention anyway. And in the big conflicts that are in the news, many people feel extremely uncomfortable about criticising a side which they see as being on the defensive. “They were attacked 22 months ago! They were attacked!” Now, there’s a huge amount of history there. It’s a very complicated history. Anybody who has even a passing awareness of that history knows just how complicated it was.

Maz:
Mmm, yeah.

David:
And “who attacked whom when” is not a straightforward question when you’re looking at who started it. It’s almost a ridiculous question to even ask. You’re going back generations here rather than something that started less than two years ago. It didn’t start less than two years ago.

But the particular events that started the current round of violence—look at that, it was outrageous. It was a horrendous series of acts. And then it’s very hard to look at the response to that and say, “This is unwarranted. This is unjustified. This is disproportionate. This is indiscriminate.” It’s very hard to say that when your starting position is such a reprehensible act of violence.

Nearly two years into this and there’s no end in sight. And it’s very hard to look at it and say that this is designed to do anything—it doesn’t seem to bring about a just end to this conflict using the methods that are being employed. And that’s extremely hard. And it’s very hard to call that out though. It’s very hard to turn the defender in the narrative into the wrong…

Maz:
The aggressor.

David:
The aggressor. Yes, absolutely. And there’s a reason—back to the Just War tradition typology—there’s a reason it separates out the types of justice. You’ve got justice of going to war—what justifies it in the first place—and then there’s what you’re permitted to do in bello.
And those are separated. They’re deliberately separated because we’re never going to agree on who was in the right and who was in the wrong. And the point is—for the in bello side of it, what you’re allowed to do—it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who started it. That’s a completely separate way of judging. It’s a completely separate way of looking at it.

So it doesn’t matter which side you’re on. It doesn’t matter which side you support. You look at the individual acts and say, “Is this acceptable or not?” And it doesn’t matter who did it. It’s still the same question. You’re looking at the same thing—the same question: is it acceptable or not? And if the answer is no, then it doesn’t matter who was doing it. The answer is no. And having the confidence to call that out is absolutely essential.

Maz:
Especially when one is a terror group and the other is a state in the case of Israel–Gaza.

David:
Yes. Absolutely. There’s a lot of outrage that Israel is held somehow to a higher standard. But Israel is a democracy. It is fighting a terrorist group which automatically has less, if any, legitimacy to start with. So it is held to a higher standard—and should be held to a higher standard. It’s a democracy. It’s supposed to uphold the rules. That’s what democracies are supposed to do. They are governed by the rule of law—supposed to be governed by the rule of law. They’re supposed to respect international norms. They are held to a higher standard. That’s not unfair. That’s just the way it is.

Maz:
And I mean, I guess for me as well is—in many ways, to me, Israel and Hamas at least are too far gone. They are too emotionally invested in this and there are a myriad of ulterior motives, real or otherwise, behind the actions—conspiracy theories as well as truths undoubtedly. To me, it’s not up to them to stop. They cannot stop.

Hamas can’t stop because they lose their legitimacy. In fact, they’re winning the strategic war perhaps by having so many civilians killed. It works in their favour. This is exactly what they were hoping for. And every civilian death creates 10 more martyrs. I mean, that’s the insurgent math, right? From McChrystal, from, you know…

David:
Absolutely. And when you understand that, the idea of playing into their hands just seems even more ridiculous, doesn’t it?

Maz:
Which totally neuters the military necessity argument—because whichever way you look at it, and we’ve got even recent history to go off, i.e. Afghanistan, where we killed insurgents en masse and en masse insurgents rose up.

Even in that debate—which also then gives fuel to perhaps half-truths or half-baked truths or conspiracy theories—because there’s just no rationale behind what’s going on right now, apart from what some might say, quite credibly now, is, you know, complete ethnic cleansing or whatever it is.

Pauline, you’re nodding—anything to add so far?

Pauline:
Yeah, I think with both of these conflicts, it’s not that they can’t stop. It’s that the costs of stopping are so high—whether that’s emotionally, nationally. You know, I think in some ways, both of these conflicts have existential elements to them, right? So you have that piece, but you also have this question of—especially in the case of Israel—they’re supposed to be a professional military, right?

So I think that’s part of what’s going on there too. I know as philosophers—well, other philosophers—I talk about emotion all the time, but other philosophers don’t want to talk about emotion. I think that’s just—whether it’s Clausewitz or whoever—this is part of warfare, right? And it’s like being in a… I know neither of you probably have had conflicts with your significant others or children or anything, but I have. I have a teenager who should be a lawyer and he loves to argue.

And you get pretty deep in these arguments and there’s just—it’s not going to end well because neither of you—I mean, you both could stop but you’re just choosing not to because you don’t want to lose face, you don’t want to… your emotions are jacked up, there’s all kinds of other things that are playing into the reasons why you want to keep going. Whether it’s the sunk cost fallacy, whatever it is, all of these kinds of things just… different kinds of interests mitigate against that, right?

So I think that’s the hard thing. They can stop. It’s not that they can’t. It’s that they are making choices. And every time you make a choice to commit an atrocity, then you are making it that much harder to restore the peace—which is the whole point in the Just War Tradition, right? The aim of war is to restore the peace.

Right? So anything you do that impedes that—and atrocities, like the empirical record is very clear on that. The more atrocities you commit, the harder it is to then come to the peace table and then to have some kind of sustainable peace where you can live together in some way after the conflict is over. And so that’s the problem with the cycle of atrocity and counter-atrocity and narrative and…

Maz:
Hmm.

Pauline:
…dehumanising the other and all of the kind of stuff that we see in both of these conflicts, right? You are incentivising everything but peace. You are undermining the conditions that you would need in order to establish a peace to begin with—much less a just peace.

David:
Absolutely.

Yeah, the idea that if you commit one more atrocity, then you’ll somehow balance the atrocities committed by the other side and this will somehow give you some kind of strategic advantage—it’s just ludicrous. And the idea of approaching it as some kind of perverse balance sheet or spreadsheet…

You brought in the dead Prussian already, Pauline!

Pauline:
I taught at a war college—I had to, right?

David:
That’s—the driver for conflict is passion, hatred, enmity. The passions. And the idea that you can commit atrocities with impunity and they are not going to inflame passions, that they are not going to perpetuate conflict, they’re not going to make finding a settlement harder—it’s just very unrealistic. It’s naïve, almost.

Maz:
And therefore also makes extermination, genocide more palatable because you’re conscious of that. You also know that if you’ve killed the father, you better watch out for the son. So therefore, let’s just do the lot and deal with the aftermath as it comes. That’s the impunity piece.

Especially when—again, Israel’s the poignant example here—when you’re backed by still the single superpower of the world. And this kind of leads me to the next question of… I mean, we’ve got bodies that we established like the ICJ, ICC, that we’ve established in order to judge these things—lest it be judged in the court of public opinion, which is what we’re seeing the cost of so dearly, especially as you alluded to before, Pauline, with social media and the TikToks and the information warfare that we’re seeing about all of these conflicts and having a serious impact because they’re reducing people’s ability to think rationally about what’s actually going on. They’re forced to take a side.

But we’ve got bodies like the ICJ and ICC where in one case, you know, when it’s Putin who’s the aggressor, we happily stand behind it and cheer—go ICC, go ICJ. But when it’s Netanyahu that’s in the crosshairs, so to speak, we sanction ICC members.

What does that tell us again about this tension: interest vs values?

Whilst I don’t intend to just harbour on the point that it’s all hopeless—I’m an eternal optimist, I think my life shows that—but I’m just forced to realise that, you know, there are some things that just don’t matter in realpolitik between nations. Some things seem nice, sound nice and, you know, make a nice bumper sticker…but in reality, when it comes down to it… some people will do what they want because might is right.

David:
So again, nothing new there. If you remember back in 2003, the attempt to get the Security Council resolution for an invasion that was going to happen—was not going to happen. The Security Council resolution was not going to happen because it was fairly clear that the French amongst others—but particularly the French—got the blame for this from the US. The French were not going to authorise a Security Council resolution to act in this case.

So the narrative became, it’s all France’s fault. The organisation, the institution is somehow less legitimate because there’s just somebody standing in the way of doing the right thing, and therefore we have to find other ways of doing this.

And it was the institution itself that started to be challenged as a result.

You’re seeing exactly the same today. The instruments for accountability that you’ve already mentioned—the ICJ, the ICC—set up specifically to provide an independent way of holding people to account have been deliberately politicised and therefore undermined, so that when they try and act, they are seen as partisan rather than those independent bodies.

And yeah, so much—so much mud has been thrown at these organisations. I would still say that the fact of bearing witness—that the organisations are still trying to demonstrate that they’re functioning, that they are indicting, they are seeking to get the process started—I think that’s important. That bearing witness is still important. It’s being noticed. Whether it’s being acted upon is another thing, but they are being called out by those institutions. Yeah.

Maz:
Well, history will remember, right? I mean, at least, you know, 50 years from now when other people discuss this, Netanyahu’s name will be, you know, with the ICC in books—which might not mean much, but at least… but it might. It just might mean something.

Pauline:
It might. I agree with David about bearing witness. It reminds me of, you know, the journalists during Vietnam, during the US interventions in Vietnam. Their view was they couldn’t change what was happening, but they could bear witness so the world could see what was happening. And I do think that’s important.

I do think both of these conflicts have put the idea of international law under a significant amount of pressure. And so I do think those institutions are under pressure. But I’m not—I hear what you’re saying, Maz, about realpolitik—but for me, there’s long-term and short-term. Most politicians are obsessed with the short-term and they’re not thinking about the long-term.

And so I’ve always tried with my students to make the—okay, if you’re a realist, great, but there are long-term consequences to things, right? And if you’re a good strategic leader, you can’t just think about the short-term. You also have to think about the long-term. And I do think for democracies, that’s in their interest—long-term—to be seen as the holders of international law and human rights.

And clearly we’re in a moment, especially in the United States, where we’re exploring to what degree we still agree with that. And we have politicians that are sceptical and hostile and saying things like we would never lose another war if we could just kill enough people. And that’s just empirically false. That’s not how it works.

But I think because of that, those institutions are under pressure. And as David pointed out, this isn’t just a 2025 issue, right? It’s a long-term issue. But I think after COVID, at least in the American context, the level of scepticism against every institution—whether that’s higher ed, the media, Congress (which has always been unpopular), the president, the judiciary, and even the military, which historically has had very high levels of trust in the American people…

The American people are sort of, you know, highly sceptical and questioning every single institution that we have. So it’s not a surprise that the international judicial structures, international law—all of that is going to come in for the same kind of…

Maz:
And rightly so, I mean, as well.

Pauline:
…criticism. And so that affects how we—what we’re willing to do and say. And I also think—as you know from reading the media—that Americans are in the midst of a generational change about support for Israel, right? And people of all backgrounds are really thinking about, here’s what our history has been with the state of Israel, and is that still…?

And alliances, you know, as Clausewitz and others would note, always undergo changes just like our friendships and our other relationships. And so I think we’re having a little moment where we’re reassessing the relationship and trying to figure out sort of what that means. So I think that’s part of it too.

Maz:
I mean, and I think many of the sensitivities you’ve highlighted of people losing trust in institutions—much of it is justified. But the problem is it’s then fanned and fuelled by Russian bots to just further divide. So there’s another layer of contestation between other powers in the world and too frequently we’re too deep into it to be able to step outside and realise that we are part of—that we are inside a propaganda war. By chastising Muslims in Britain—or credible issues, of course, there are many credible issues, and there’s always a kernel of truth in these narratives—but they’re often blown out of proportion or politicised and weaponised to create further division.

This is one of them.

To maybe just take it to one extra point. And that is the recent bombing of Iran by your illustrious state—country—Pauline. Look, I’m kind of in two minds. I think I’m more on the, “no, no, this was really bad” side. In fact, I think I’m probably about 75% towards that side.

But what does it say to us about the idea of preventive vs preemptive strike? Because this was couched as a preemptive strike. It was sold as imminent. But then even Netanyahu says, you know, “months, months”. So this was a preventative—masked as preemptive—but it was certainly preventative at best. That’s to give it its, kind of, you know… to remove any other plausible—as-they-might-be—intentions behind attacking Iran.

But how do you view what’s happened there through the military ethics lens and perhaps the dangerous precedent it sets?

Pauline:
Well, I mean, generally when it comes to that distinction between preemptive war and preventive war—politicians (George W. Bush did this too) tried to call Iraq a preemptive war. It was not a preemptive war. It was a preventative war, right?

So I am sceptical in general. I think preventive war is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons—we could do an entire episode just on that. So I think it’s a bad idea. I also think that American presidents have this tendency of thinking that they can do one-off strikes or one-off kinds of military action. And it’s like the—you know, in the States we have this office supply store that has this big red button, and it’s the “easy” button. And you just push the button and then, you know, all is good. And our military tends to be that easy button. So when we don’t know what to do, we’re like, well, we’ll just either send in the Marines because they’re awesome or we’ll bomb some stuff, right?

So, you know, I think there were lots of things going into that. But the notion that it was preemptive—it stretches, you know, anything like truth. Is that to say I think Iran is like a fabulous, wonderful paragon of—no, of course not, right?

Do I think they should have a nuclear weapon? Probably not. I’m not sure we should have nuclear weapons, right? So, you know, there’s those kinds of questions. But it’s also not clear—to go back to the Just War thing—that they exhausted last resort, that you had dealt with this diplomatically as far as you could.

So I think there were just so many pieces of that that were problematic.

Now you could argue, well, if there was a chance to take out Iran’s program, isn’t that worth the risk? And I’m like, I don’t know, because it’s the Middle East. And I don’t really like us messing around in that part of the world, because things tend to escalate. And you can’t control the escalation. So I tend to be very sceptical.

Like, I’m sure—I know that the military people involved in that mission, absolute professionals. They did their job, they did what they were supposed to do. All of that. So it’s not about them. It’s the ad Bellum—the resort to force, the politicians making the decision. And is that the best decision in my view as an ethicist? No, because it’s not last resort. And the chances of things spinning out of control—they don’t seem to have—but you can’t know that in the moment you’re making this decision.

And so I just think it’s a risk that, as it turns out, clearly wasn’t necessarily worth it. But you also kind of have to go with what did you know at the time? You just—you know, humans are bad at assessing what’s going to happen.

Maz:
Yeah.

David:
That’s kind of the challenge there, isn’t it? Because what was known at the time—the intelligence agencies said it’s not imminent. The allies said it’s not imminent. But a presidential hunch says it was.

Pauline:
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Maz:
Well, Israeli intelligence said it was imminent. That’s what we went with. And of course, I had to laugh when our Prime Minister, Albanese, was asked in a media conference, “Have you seen the intelligence? Are you confident with the intelligence?” “We don’t discuss intelligence matters.” So he couldn’t even answer the “I’ve seen it and I’m comfortable with it.” So it doesn’t even feature. “We do not discuss intelligence or security matters.”

Pauline:
Yeah.

Maz:
How do you not expect people to start doubting the institutions? How do you not? I mean, I just do not see how people don’t realise this is an own goal. Sorry, David, I jumped in. You were going to say some more.

David:
No, I think you’re absolutely right. But to Pauline’s point about the idea that you can carry out a massive strike and then just unpress the button and say, “We finish now”—it is a peculiar idea. I think it’s something to do with the Western way of war, almost—but certainly the American way of war.

Pauline:
We’re done.

Maz:
Obliterated it.

David:
Our opponents don’t look at things like that was a discreet act. They will look at it in context—in the long term. For example, the Chinese Embassy bombing in Belgrade. Barely anybody in the West would even remember such an act—but it is remembered. It is remembered in China. It was an act of humiliation—as far as they were concerned, a deliberate act of humiliation. It is not a passing moment in a conflict a long time ago. It is yet another in a long litany of humiliations—deliberate humiliations—against the Chinese state and people. They’re not one-offs. They’re seen in context. They’re seen in the long term. And I think it’s important to try and remember that.

Maz:
Absolutely. Again, it’s like the Hamas–Israel, right? The war didn’t start on 7th of October. And the same point about the bombing in Belgrade—I mean, it’s remembered in Belgrade. Not just the bombing of the Chinese embassy, which is often waived as Western impunity again, but the bombing of Belgrade full stop, which was again another NATO action.

Which many will argue wasn’t really justified. Whether it was or not—it just depends on which side of the bombs you sit on. That’s the sad truth. That’s too much cognitive bandwidth for us to wrestle with when you’re forced to choose a side, unfortunately.

I just want to maybe dig down now to soldiers and their lived experience. And I’ll maybe start again on Pauline on this one because you wrote the book on obedience. And in our previous episode we also talked about “disciplined disobedience.”

Firstly, can you just give us a summary of what that actually means for those who haven’t listened to our previous episode? And then—what do you think, is it still possible in a place like—if you’re a Russian soldier or if you’re an Israeli soldier—is that even possible? Is that even… is that too high a bar to expect soldiers to exercise something called “disciplined disobedience”?

Pauline:
Yeah, “disciplined disobedience” just is the idea that under certain circumstances—usually with good moral reasons, and I talk about that in depth in the book—that there might be times that it might actually be the virtuous or the moral thing to disobey, but that you have to be disciplined about it. And that’s actually pulling from General Milley’s idea, right? That you have to be right.

You have to be willing to suck the consequences if you’re not right or it doesn’t turn out well. But that, as professionals, we might expect you to exercise your professional judgment—expertise, including moral expertise—in the moment, to make a decision where you think something’s about to happen that is unprofessional, immoral. Obviously, the illegal thing is the obvious one, but it’s much more complicated than that.

I think it’s still—I think it’s still possible. The question is cost, and how much cost can we ask people to bear in doing the right thing? And I think that’s an open question. I think for people who are in professional militaries and democracies—as David said—like that bar should be pretty darn high, because you are doing what you are doing in our name. So if you’re committing war crimes, I’m committing them too.

So I think what I would expect from my former students or from members of the American military is there’s perhaps a higher bar. But I also think there’s just a human bar, right? It’s not the case that every Russian soldier has no moral qualms. That’s just not—it’s much more complicated than that.

Obviously you have propaganda, you have the society you came from, all this kind of stuff, but people are critical thinkers in every society. And so I do think there’s a basic level of humanity that we ought to expect. But I do think it is a fair question about how much cost should we ask people to take on?

I would also say that I think it’s better if you don’t have to take on that cost alone. It’s better if you have compatriots or there are other people who are dissenting, disobeying. And we have seen this in the IDF, right? We do see some refusals. And where you have more than one, then I think that makes it easier.

But like Milley said, sometimes you just have to be willing to accept the cost involved. And maybe the cost involved is lower than the cost of living with yourself if you committed atrocities. And I think that’s what—as ethicists—that’s what we hope, right? But that’s not to say it’s an easy decision. Because militaries are designed to not just cultivate obedience, but they’re actually designed to cultivate…

Maz:
Mm-hmm.

Pauline:
…compliance, which is a completely and utterly different thing. And especially in autocratic states or in these kinds of non-professional military contexts, there’s a lot of coercion. There’s a lot of compliance as opposed to obedience—which is why I wrote the book—to get people to think about obedience as a virtue, as opposed to compliance.

Maz:
Compliance, yeah. David, anything to add?

David:
Yeah, I mean—it is a superb book.

Pauline:
Thank you. Thank you, David.

Maz:
Yes. Seconded.

David:
So the default position for a soldier, sailor, aviator is: trust your prince. That’s the formula within the Just War tradition. That’s the default—except if what you are being instructed to do outrages the common decency of mankind, as Walzer puts it. Now, that’s pretty easy if your order is, “Bayonet that baby.” No. Doesn’t matter who tells you to do it—you can’t. That goes beyond trusting my prince.

My prince has now told me to do something I can clearly see is wrong. I cannot do that. And it doesn’t matter who tells me to do that.

Invade a country? That’s a bit harder. It’s a bit harder for the soldier to work out. “Well, I’m sure the prince has got a good reason for this.”

Some of the Just War revisionists will take this and say: what’s outrageous? You go and rob a bank. You pull the balaclava on, and you’re there with your shotgun, and then the police turn up and the two sides start shooting each other. You don’t claim that there’s moral equality between the two sides. The police are trying to stop you from robbing a bank. You know you are robbing a bank. You are in the wrong. You are not morally equal to the police.

You are wrong. You have chosen to do the wrong thing. And that seems… you know, that seems to make sense.

Russia has chosen to invade Ukraine. And therefore, if you’re a Russian soldier, then it doesn’t take that much effort to work out that you have invaded a sovereign country. Surely you must know you’re the equivalent of the bank robber.

But really, is it that easy? What about if the country is actually saying, “It’s our bank. They’ve stolen our bank. You’re not the bank robber, you’re the bank liberator.”

Maz:
They’re the good guys.

David:
Okay, maybe I’m not the bank robber, and the police—not. That’s an illicit regime. They’re the ones trying to stop me from claiming my bank.

It gets muddy very, very, very quickly, which is one of the reasons why we keep the distinction between the two levels in the tradition. And it’s getting blurred. It’s getting fuzzy—I accept that. There’s a lot of blurring between the divisions of moral responsibility.

But unless you are absolutely sure—unless you have lost confidence in your prince, in your state, which can happen…

There was a big dip in confidence after the dodgy dossier in 2003. There were militaries—Western militaries—that went along with it because they believed, “I’m sure the politicians know more than they are able to put in the public domain.”

And then it turned out—no. They were just making it up. It was made up. It was back to your “interest over values.”

Yeah, it was made up. That was a huge damage to the institution and to the trust in that Clausewitzian Trinity. There was a lot of damage done in Western institutions because of that. And it’s taken a long time to rebuild that, I think.

So it can be easily lost. The default position, though, is: trust your prince, unless it is clearly wrong.

And that’s really hard to say about the strategic decisions. And the privileged group in the military that are genuinely capable of making that calculation are the ones that straddle the line—the military–political divide.

Again, Walzer says we don’t exactly know which rank that is in every case, but you kind of know it when you see it.

They’re the people who either are providing the military advice to the prince, to the state—or should be. And their job is to elbow their way into those rooms and provide that professional advice and the expertise that Pauline refers to.

Politicians haven’t got a rich background in things like the Just War tradition. They’re not familiar with those incredibly rich professional doctrines that guide professional behaviour. And that’s precisely why it is up to senior military officers to be in those rooms—to make sure that they are heard.

Only as long as the soldier—the “common” soldier (there’s no such thing as a common soldier)—as long as everybody below that level is confident that that is being done on their behalf, then they can trust their prince.

But if they don’t think that conversation is happening, if they don’t think somebody’s looking after their broader interests in that sense, you have a crisis of legitimacy within the organisation.

Then you have selective conscientious objections starting to happen. People going absent without leave.

It’s fascinating to look at the history of things like selective conscientious objection and the way it is recorded—because different militaries will record it, and very few militaries will actually record the number of people who disagreed with the decision to go to war.

It will be an administrative sanction for failing to turn up for a movement or something. It won’t be a conscientious act. It will be a discipline act.

Maz:
Hmm. Absent without leave. Yeah.

David:
Exactly. But obviously, the less confidence you have in your cause, the less legitimacy that you believe you’re acting with—unsurprisingly, the much higher those kinds of instances start going up as people literally vote with their feet and say, “I don’t think I can do this.”

Maz:
I mean, unfortunately, Walzer also gives us “supreme emergency,” right? Which, you know, those in the halls of power…

David:
The slippery slope of “supreme emergency.”

Pauline:
Which is one of the worst. Yeah, I don’t like that argument. Although our discussion just now reminds me of one of my favourite things that I always love to teach—it’s in Shakespeare’s Henry V, you know, the dialogue the night before the Battle of Agincourt, where exactly what David has just been talking about—that’s the conversation between the men.

And of course, the king is there in disguise and they don’t know it’s the king. But that’s the conversation they’re having is, “Well, what if the king’s cause is wrong? What does that mean for us? What are we about to do?”

And I do—I think that… I like the Kenneth Branagh version—but I think that clip is always one that always generated rich discussions in my classes because I think it’s intuitive in a way, and then it’s counterintuitive in a way. And these are the kinds of things that people are wrestling with.

And I think, in general, you’re going to trust your leadership. Right? I think that’s just sort of human nature and the way human societies are constructed. So if you’re not sure, you’re probably going to defer to your leadership—especially if you’re a low-level private “Schmuckatelli,” as we say in the US, right?

You’re going to think, well, they must have intelligence. Somebody must know what they’re doing, right?

Maz:
Especially when they tell you they don’t discuss intelligence.

Pauline:
So I think those things and those conversations—as David said—it’s murky, it’s difficult. And yet we still have people—whether it’s at My Lai or other places—who were like, there were people at My Lai who refused or who just turned around, right? And didn’t actively participate.

Which I think is an indictment of the other people that did, because someone there looked at that and said, “Dude. No. No, I’m not doing this.”

And so that sort of like, “Well, everyone was doing it”—it just doesn’t fly. So we do have some expectation of that moral expertise from members of the military profession.

Maz:
And I think—sorry, please, please, no, go, go—

David:
I was just saying, Maz, I know one thing that you’re very interested in—as we all are—is the whole idea of moral injury. And it’s very closely related to this discussion. When you are in war, you do have to do terrible things sometimes. That’s the nature of war.

If it turns out that you didn’t really need to do them after all—because it was all based on a giant lie, or it wasn’t what you thought it was, or there was a massive difference between why you were told you were going to war and the real reason that you went to war—or, in fact, it turns out that you can all go home after 20 years of fighting because we can just leave now…

That has massive impacts on the people who…

Maz:
We’re done now.

Pauline:
We’re done.

David:
…believed. Who did trust their princes. And that betrayal manifests itself in moral injury. And we know how dangerous that is for our people. The very real human costs related to the suicide rate in our veteran communities—and partly it’s PTSD, there’s a variety of associated medical conditions there—but partly…

Pauline:
Thank you.

David:
…it’s that sense of betrayal. That moral injury when people stop believing that actually what they were doing was justified. And that’s a very heavy burden to pay. There’s a difference between having the regrettable necessity of acting, and doing something that basically turned out not to have been necessary at all.

Maz:
I couldn’t agree more. And that speaks to me more than you probably can imagine. Me and many of my peers who’ve now left the Australian Defence Force—but many of us left with questions. What was it all for?

So yeah, it absolutely speaks to that.

But I think it all—and that’s perhaps a nice segue to my next question. And that’s directly related to you, Pauline, because I feel like you’ve done—you’ve exercised some disciplined disobedience, I think, recently. And perhaps you’ve lived and walked your own ethics.

Can you summarise why you resigned from a very prestigious post? And also maybe link—what is the post for? Who is it for? Who does it represent? What does it stand for? As a way of kind of bringing to light this tension that we’ve just discussed, which you’ve just lived—or are living, let me correct myself—as we speak.

Pauline:
So the Stockdale Chair is for the US Navy—maybe not the highest, but one of the highest—positions that is responsible for ethics, right? The US Naval Academy also has an equivalent ethics chair. But this is a person—usually, over the last couple decades, a civilian—who is a trained ethicist, a philosopher…

…and who is responsible for helping guide the ethical culture of the Navy, and teaching ethics, and engaging in ethics across the fleet and the force, as well as within the Naval War College—which is one of our graduate schools. So this is not undergraduate education. These are not cadets. These are mid-career military professionals.

And I resigned because I was no longer able to do that job—especially teaching and scholarship—to the level of excellence and ethical integrity that I thought was necessary, given the executive orders, the interference with academic freedom, the lack of support of academic freedom within my chain of command, which I had had before.

For the last seven years I’d taught all kinds of interesting things. I had written interesting books, including On Obedience. I’ve been writing a book on ethics of care and honour. And it became clear after January—and this is all documented in Tom Nichols’ great piece in The Atlantic—that it was just impossible for me to do my job.

And I thought the one thing I could do as Ethics Chair—since I couldn’t do my job and I couldn’t protect my faculty colleagues or my students—was resign. I could resign in protest and say: No. This is not okay. It’s not acceptable.

And there is a lot of fear. So it was a way to take what is a very privileged position and say: This is not okay with me—and it’s so not okay that I’m going to leave a job I love.

I’ve been so lucky in this job. The students are incredible. I’ve got to do incredible scholarship. I’ve worked with the fleet, the joint force, and the War College. It wasn’t an easy decision to make. Also there’s that whole like—paycheck thing—and I have kids, and rent, and things like that.

There were real costs. But we talked about moral injury. And I was clear in talking to Tom that there was moral injury. And at some point I just couldn’t do it anymore, right? And maintain my authenticity and my ethics. I stand in the classroom and tell my students they need to have moral courage. And I’d be pretty hypocritical if I continued to do that, if I wasn’t willing to have moral courage, and if I was teaching in an institution that has made the choice to comply.

Maz:
So what sort of pressures were you under that led to that decision? And I’ll link the article as well just for more detail—but just in a nutshell?

Pauline:
Yeah. I mean, a lot of it was the external—there’s a change in the Secretary of Defense, the scepticism, hostility to anything that’s not “lethality” (which I don’t actually know what that means). The firing of prominent female leadership within the US Navy…

The Stockdale Chair is something that’s an honour, and it weighed heavily on me. And I didn’t want to get fired. So there were lots of those pressures.

It was also the internal pressure of: I’m an ethicist. I need to be able to look at myself in the mirror. I need to be able to look at my children in the eyes. And I’ve always told them: you should always do the right thing, especially when it’s really hard and you think maybe you’re going to get in trouble.

So at some point it was just like—I need to do this for me. But also for my colleagues, because I’m very protective of my faculty colleagues. And I couldn’t actually protect them by staying. So I thought I could still engage in the work, in the fight, and advocate for them sort of “outside the wire,” if you will.

Because if the Ethics Chair isn’t willing to take the hit, then it’s not fair to expect other people to.

And it was completely my choice. There was no, “Pauline, you need to resign.” It was my decision. But it was absolutely a necessary decision if I was going to continue to have integrity, to be whole, and to be able to do the work that I wanted to do—because within the US military right now, I can’t do the work that I’ve been doing for the last 30 years.

Maz:
Interesting. And what has been the reception? I know I’ve seen on social media at least you’ve received many accolades from also very prominent ethicists. What has been the reception—and perhaps even the impact—of that decision? Not that it ultimately matters, really—because it matters to you, right? It’s about protecting your own moral sanctity.

Pauline:
Yeah. I don’t—I’m not a utilitarian. So yeah, I’m not sure what the impact is. I do know that some of my colleagues said it helped them because I was speaking out, and then they could figure out—as I think we’ve alluded to—what steps they wanted to take within their own parameters to do what they needed to do. Which didn’t necessarily mean resigning.

The reception has been overwhelmingly positive. There have been a few critical, you know, “woke leftist Marxist professor at the Naval War College” articles in the usual sort of spaces—which is not the first time I’ve had those. But overwhelmingly positive and supportive.

And especially within the ethics community—I think many of my colleagues—I mean, David’s been incredibly supportive, was one of the first people who reached out. But people have made it clear that even though they feel they can’t resign, they’re struggling. They’re feeling it.

So it’s been very positive, I think. And many people have said, “I agree with what you’re doing. I’m afraid to do the same thing or I can’t do the same thing.”

What I’ve said to people is: if you’re still inside the government and you still feel like you can do the work and maintain your integrity, then do it.

I just got to a point where I wasn’t allowed—I wouldn’t have been allowed—to do the work in the same way. And I wasn’t willing to compromise what I think of as good philosophy: teaching Just War thinking, teaching moral and ethical failure, teaching the kinds of things that I think need to be taught for our military professionals so that they can go out there and do whatever they need to do with integrity.

And hopefully avoid that moral injury, or have the capacity to mitigate it and protect their people from it. So—yeah, it’s been overwhelmingly positive. I don’t know what the impact will be. I don’t have any grand illusions of this going to change anybody’s mind in leadership. That wasn’t the intention. The intention was: I’m an ethicist, and I need to do the right thing. And I need to be able to live with myself.

Maz:
Yeah. Take the hard right.

David:
Well, we’re absolutely proud of you, Pauline. And after doing this for nearly 25 years, and referring to the study which demonstrates that ethics professors are no more ethical than any other kind of professor—it’s really nice to be able to look at you, provide you as an example of a professor actually doing the right thing.

Pauline:
Thank you, David.

Pauline:
That’s right. We have a bad rep.

Pauline:
So one example against the field of… not so much.

Maz:
But you’re the Admiral Boyce—you’re the Admiral Boyce of ethics.

Maz:
Yeah. What is the state of military ethics teaching in the UK, David? Are you feeling the pressure as well?

David:
Well, no, not in the same way. So I can give you a couple of examples that I think illustrate it.

It would take somebody from outside to be able to judge the state of the profession in the UK, because there are so few of us doing what we do. The military ethics community is very, very small. So basically, you’re asking me how good is what I’m doing. That’s a bit hard for me to answer.

But this is what I’d say: when I started at Staff College back in 2002, the ethics component of the Advanced Command and Staff Course—so Lieutenant Colonels and equivalent across three services, 50–60 countries, 300 students—the ethics and law package there was:

• One 45-minute lecture on the Just War tradition
• One 45-minute lecture on the Law of Armed Conflict
• And then one classroom discussion about whether these rules were still applicable for the 21st century—were they still appropriate?

Fast forward to now, 2025. That ethics and law package is about two weeks of the 44-week course. And you’re seeing the same across all of the other courses.

I’m privileged to teach the CO designate course with the Royal Navy—and have done for about 15 years now. And again, when I started on that, I had perhaps an hour on a six-week course to talk about the ethical challenges of senior leadership.

It’s now a two-week course and I get them for nearly a full day.

And that’s driven by them. It’s not a top-down, First Sea Lord requirement. It’s not coming from the top wanting to do more of this stuff. It’s coming from the people themselves.

So the feedback: “The ethical challenges of leadership are hard. They’re really hard. And we want to explore. We want to have time to actually reflect professionally about how to do the right thing in difficult circumstances. We want the space and time to think about that.”

So while other things can get moved out and taken out of the curricula, this is a consistent call for over two decades to have more of this. And no matter how much you put in, the feedback is still: “We need more of this.”

“This is the stuff that keeps me awake at night. This is the stuff I need to know what the answer is—or at least how to get to the right answer, even if it’s not a straightforward answer. And I need to know what my peers think as well. I need to talk about this with my community of practice. What do we do in this situation? What’s our answer?”

And that’s a conversation that’s getting bigger, rather than smaller.

So in that sense, I would simply say it’s healthier than it has been for a long time. Could it be better? Absolutely. There are many, many problems and issues that need to be dealt with and resolved.

Maz:
Hmm.

David:
But I’d say the same—I’m just back from teaching in Australia, as you know, at the Australian War College. Very similar things there. The conversations with the senior leadership and with their staff college—very, very similar challenges, very similar issues.

And an enthusiasm. They want to talk about these issues. They want to engage with it. They want to talk through and find the right answers—the right professional answers—for the challenges of the changing environment.

Pauline:
And I would just say that absolutely tracks—even the last six months with my students. We talked about Israel and Gaza and war crimes in January, right? They’re wrestling with tough stuff, and they want to talk to each other.

And I think having that community of practice—that professional conversation—is so important, because then it’s not just individuals trying to make these decisions. You’re making them as and discussing them as part of a profession.

So that desire—and I’ve certainly seen that over my years working with the military—there’s just more and more desire. Even—we do flag level courses as well, general officer level courses—and people want to think about this stuff and talk about this stuff.

And so maybe that’s why I’m not as pessimistic as other people are. Because I have sat in those classrooms and participated in those discussions. And the students are very thoughtful.

And even in the changed environment, we’ve been wrestling with what it means to talk about these questions together, with new leadership. But the desire for those conversations has not changed.

And then the aftermath of my resignation—I’ve had even more active-duty people reaching out and saying, “Here’s what I’m struggling with. Here’s the question.”

So I think that desire for the conversation is something that crosses all of our communities of practice. And I think that’s the most valuable thing—because then people might feel like they’re less alone.

I’m not the only faculty member in professional military education in the US that’s resigned. There’s been quite a few of us, right? So it’s not a happy club to be part of—but knowing that there are other people in the club is helpful, right? Because then you don’t feel quite as out there and alone.

And I think that’s really important when we’re thinking about the military.

Maz:
Mm. And that’s wonderful to hear.

I think—even as a former military member—I’ve thoroughly always enjoyed these types of discussions. And I’m glad to hear that these discussions are still prominent and feature.

And most of all, I hope that as these students of today—who you’ve both taught or teach—as they progress in rank, as they get to the positions where it becomes harder and the cost is greater, you know, to take the hard right over the easy wrong, or to display moral courage—moral courage that’s being taught and inculcated in members of the armed forces, certainly in those that we’re familiar with, you know, from the moment you join at this point in time.

And that’s why I kind of alluded to earlier before that, you know, you Pauline, you might be the Admiral Boyce of military ethics—because that’s an example where we see, you know, a prominent senior member in Defence standing up to the Iraq war and saying, “Well, no, no, no. I don’t consider this war to be legal,” and fighting the fight until sufficient justification was wrangled.

But this is what we want to see. This is what we want to—
And I feel like this is perhaps a good way to end this episode on as well—because it’s perhaps a little bit of a positive note.

But I really do feel and hope that this is what’s needed at the senior levels of Defence. Because I’ve jokingly said so many times on this podcast that “values are for Colonel and below, and interests are one-star and above.” And unfortunately, I’ve kind of said it as a joke, but I’ve found it to be rather true more often than not.

Because once you’re at that level—you’re in the strategic space, in the interest space—it’s a little bit easier to forget about all the values that you’ve been instilled with, and the ones that you’ve been instilling in your soldiers.

So perhaps this is the last—yeah, sorry, I just want to hand over to both of you for closing remarks on that particular point. Where you are, how hopeful you are about the future of the profession.

Pauline:
So my motto at the War College was: “Every day is ethics day”, which I beat into my students and my faculty members until they begged for mercy.

But I really do believe that. And so I am hopeful. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. And I think the pressures—especially on the professional military in the United States—there’s just so many issues, including domestic deployment of the military, potentially, for all kinds of things that are not good.

So I think we face a lot of challenges. But I think that my students—and I do hear back from my students, and they do keep in touch—and I think that there is an impact there. And it’s that they’ve learned to ask good questions. And they’ve learned those frameworks like Just War thinking or moral and ethical failure—about how to think through things.

So my job—contrary to some of my critics—is not to tell my students what to think, but to give them frameworks about how to think about things. And they’re professionals. They have brains. They can think. I’m just giving them tools and skills and frameworks and language to do that thinking.

So I’m pretty optimistic.

That said—the last six months have been depressing in some ways, because there’s a lot of fear and there’s a lot of compliance—much more than I might have expected.

We’ll see.

Maz:
And that’s a warning. That’s a warning sign.

David:
I think I have a very similar message. I’ve got a lot of confidence in the profession itself to be able to be resilient enough to cope.

But how long the profession can remain resilient is a broader issue. A sustained assault on its professional pillars over a very long time will inevitably damage that organisational value. So it just depends how sustained the attack on it is.

But for now, I’ve got a great deal of confidence in the people and the organisational culture itself.

Maz:
Great to hear.

Well, on that slightly more positive note than the rest of the discussion—nonetheless very realistic as well—I just want to say my big thanks to both of you for finding the time and managing to connect us over three continents—US, UK, and Australia. The AUKUS timeline. Especially you, David—for you, it’s past midnight now. I don’t know how you think this clearly past midnight. By 10, I’m gone.

David:
Absolute pleasure to join you. And it’s great to see you back, Maz.

Maz:
Thank you. It’s great to be back.

Pauline:
And thank you. Thanks for the invitation—and really appreciate the conversations. Even difficult conversations that you’re pushing us to have, and encouraging people to have—that’s really… that’s the work.

Maz:
Thank you both. And best of luck, Pauline, for whatever comes next. I’m sure you will land on your feet—I have no doubt. Nature has a way of working these things out. Thank you both very much. We’ll be in touch.

Pauline:
Thank you.

David:
Good night.