In Renaissance Europe, war and the use of force were regular phenomena and likewise subject of common rules. The theory of ‘just war’, dating back to ancient times, was further developed by legal scholars, and all belligerents claimed to have a just cause, often explained in printed pamphlets. International law consisted of theory and practice, and thus, they should be considered in a mutual context. The focus was still on the question of who had a right to wage war, i.e. on the jus ad bellum, and barely on regulations of warfare or on a containment of war. International law in Renaissance Europe rooted in its very society, in its rules and values. Legal debates and war justifications consolidated the Christian European community, which even in war times did not break apart, even if it was contradictory to the principle of sovereignty and the idea that a sovereign owes no justification to anyone. Moreover, scholars and belligerents argued with natural law and insisted in the universality of international law, although it was in fact basically European. Thus, in Renaissance Europe well-established traditions existed for how to handle war, but they were more and more challenged by the idea of sovereignty, as well as by the European expansion and by global interaction.

This chapter explores the justification and legitimisation of war and ‘imperfect’ uses of force both in legal scholarship and diplomatic practice. The Grotian synthesis of ‘just’ and ‘formal’ war entered mainstream scholarship and reached its full explanatory force in the work of Vattel. The resilience of just war in the face of its impracticality among sovereign state in scholarship can, among other, be explained by the fact that the subtle interplay of two conceptions of law in fields of legal application - , gelled well with diplomatic practice. Whereas states applied the jus in bello and jus post bellum with regards to claims to the justice of the war, the just war doctrine remained a common discourse for the justification of resort to war and force and added an instrument to the toolbox of alliances diplomacy.

The final chapter considers tensions between beliefs in the “healthy,” salvific character of crusading and anxieties about the morality of violence. It argues that, finding their origins in events that took place during the First Crusade, these tensions became especially acute in late medieval crusade culture, crystallizing in works by John Gower, John Wyclif, and Michel Pintoin, among others, and complexly articulated in The Siege of Jerusalem and Richard Coeur de Lion. The chapter reads these romances alongside literary and historical responses to the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, pogroms against Europe’s Jewish communities, and acts of cannibalism perpetrated by crusaders at the siege of Ma‘arra in 1098. The Siege of Jerusalem, Richard Coeur de Lion, and authors who wrote about these events deployed similar representational strategies to raise questions about the corruptive potential and human costs of holy war.

This chapter provides a brief introduction to the ethics and laws of war. The first part outlines what international law and the ‘just war’ tradition say about war; the second explores the conduct of war; and the third examines two recent dilemmas as examples of moral and legal debate: the legitimacy of pre-emptive self-defence and the use of cluster bombs.

Chapter 4 surveys a wide range of friendly and hostile interstate relations in ancient societies, where war was often the normal state of affairs. Notwithstanding the numerous conflicts, polities tried in the end, through alliances and diplomatic relations, to establish peaceful relations in view of political stability and economic prosperity. The chapter analyses hospitality rules regarding foreigners, treaties between polities and the establishment of diplomatic relations, which emerged as an international system in the ancient Near East during the mid-fourteenth century bce. An alternative to diplomacy in conflict management, typical of the Greek world, was arbitration and mediation with the help of a third party. In a final section, the chapter outlines how states, when diplomacy failed, started a war procedurally. In conclusion, the chapter argues that, in the absence of an international court, the enforcement of diplomatic rules and treaties was in many ancient societies ensured by the supranational authority of the gods.

Chapter 2 traces the historical development of the law on the use of force from antiquity to the end of World War I.

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.

Shakespeare’s Henry V shapes popular consciousness of England/Britain at war, yet resists accusations of jingoism. Its national imagining involves conscientious doubts about the justice of war itself. Chapter 5 shows that this appealingly inward, conscientious dimension of English national identity on stage is predicated on Scotland’s occlusion. Scotland was a major player in the Hundred Years’ War. Henry IV kidnapped the child heir to the Scots throne, James I. Henry V then forced James to fight his subjects, the Scots, in France. Yet Shakespeare carefully avoids acknowledging Scotland as a kingdom. He develops, from earlier history plays, a metaphorical plot that produces the idea of England’s island integrity as an effect of its king’s chaste reformation. In this plot, England is threatened by the wild incontinence of its royal heir until his reformation effectively secures England’s insularity, enabling English advancement ‘beyond sea’ to France. The analogy between royal self-chastening and English insular sea-power is traced through Greene’s Bacon and Bungay, Marlowe’s Edward II, the anonymous Edward III to Henry IV 1 & 2 and Henry V.

The introduction provides an overview of the link between religion and war, offering a broad sketch of classical legends, wartime ethics, national sentiments, and ritual traditions. This is followed by summaries of each chapter.