Modern Strategy

This workshop was centred around an activity where the students had to design and present a counterinsurgency plan to combat IRA insurgents in the Falls Road area of Belfast at the height of The Troubles. In groups, students then presented their plans to the rest of the workshop attendees. This was to show students how different perspectives can lead to different counterinsurgency strategies. The main aim of this style of this workshop was to retain student engagement, whilst providing peer-to-peer learning.

I delivered a lecture on how ethics complicates military strategy. I started by giving a quick introduction to deontological and teleological ethics, in order to teach students how both approaches are incompatible with warfare strategy. I then followed up with a detailed explanation of the just war theory as found in Michael Walzer's 'Just and Unjust Wars'. I explained how just war theory works, as well as explaining the ideas of jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post-bellum. After covering the theory behind military ethics I moved on to practical applications and complications. This included the use of nuclear weapons, the utilisation of torture, and the rules of war. The lecture finished by giving questions that were to be covered in the seminar.

This workshop was centred around three thought experiments designed to get the students to think about practical problems in military ethics. The first problem students were tasked with was the ticking time bomb. The second was whether students would return fire after receiving fire from a crowd of civilians. The third was surrounding whether students would follow an order to fire nuclear weapons. Each scenario is hotly contested within ethical debates, and served to inform the students about the complexities of ethics, and how ethics is individually subjective.