Military Medical Ethics in Contemporary Armed Conflict Mobilizing Medicine in the Pursuit of Just War

Beleaguered countries struggling against aggression or powerful nations defending others from brutal regimes mobilize medicine to wage just war. As states funnel medical resources to maintain unit readiness and conserve military capabilities, numerous ethical challenges foreign to peacetime medicine result. Force conservation drives combat hospitals to prioritize warfighter care over all others. Civilians find themselves bereft of medical attention; prison officials force feed hunger-striking detainees; policymakers manage healthcare to win the hearts and minds of local nationals; and scientists develop neuro-technologies or nanosurgery to create super soldiers. When the fighting ends, intractable moral dilemmas rebound. Post-war justice demands enormous investments of time, resources and personnel. But losing interest and no longer zealous, war-weary nations forget their duties to rebuild ravaged countries abroad and rehabilitate their war-torn veterans at home. Addressing these incendiary issues, Military Medical Ethics in Contemporary Armed Conflict integrates the ethics of medicine and the ethics of war. Medical ethics in times of war is not identical to medical ethics in times of peace, but a unique discipline. Without war, there is no military medicine, and without just war there is no military medical ethics. Military Medical Ethics in Contemporary Armed Conflict revises, defends, and rebuts wartime medical practices, just as it lays the moral foundation for casualty care in future conflicts.

Michael L. Gross is Professor of Political Science at The University of Haifa, Israel, specializing in military ethics and military medical ethics and related questions of national security. His articles have appeared in numerous prominent journals, and his books include Ethics and Activism (Cambridge, 1997), Bioethics and Armed Conflict (MIT Press, 2006), Moral Dilemmas of Modern War (Cambridge, 2010); The Ethics of Insurgency (Cambridge, 2015) and two edited volumes, Military Medical Ethics for the 21st Century (Routledge, 2013) and Soft War (Cambridge, 2017). He is editor of the Routledge book series War, Conflict and Ethics and has led workshops on battlefield ethics, medicine, and national security for the Dutch Ministry of Defense, The US Army Medical Department, the Defence Medical Services (UK), The US Naval Academy, the Israel Defense Forces and the International Committee of Military Medicine.