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Chapter 2 - Raids

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2023

Deane-Peter Baker
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Canberra
Roger Herbert
Affiliation:
United States Naval Academy, Maryland
David Whetham
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

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?

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The Ethics of Special Ops
Raids, Recoveries, Reconnaissance, and Rebels
, pp. 30 - 52
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Raids
  • Deane-Peter Baker, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Roger Herbert, United States Naval Academy, Maryland, David Whetham, King's College London
  • Book: The Ethics of Special Ops
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009292061.003
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  • Raids
  • Deane-Peter Baker, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Roger Herbert, United States Naval Academy, Maryland, David Whetham, King's College London
  • Book: The Ethics of Special Ops
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009292061.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Raids
  • Deane-Peter Baker, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Roger Herbert, United States Naval Academy, Maryland, David Whetham, King's College London
  • Book: The Ethics of Special Ops
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009292061.003
Available formats
×