Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline and the Law of War - Softcover

Osiel, Mark J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 076580798X ISBN 13: 9780765807984

Publisher: Transaction Publishers, 2001

Synopsis

A soldier obeys illegal orders, thinking them lawful. When should we excuse his misconduct as based in reasonable error? How can courts convincingly convict the soldier's superior officer when, after Nuremberg, criminal orders are ex-pressed through winks and nods, hints and insinuations? Can our notions of the soldier's "due obedience," designed for the Roman legionnaire, be brought into closer harmony with cur-rent understandings of military conflict in the contemporary world? Mark J. Osiel answers these questions in light of new learning about atrocity and combat cohesion, as well as changes in warfare and the nature of military conflict. Sources of atrocity are far more varied than current law as-sumes, and such variations display consistent patterns. The law now generally requires that soldiers resolve all doubts about the legality of a superior's order in favor of obedience. It ex-cuses compliance with an illegal order unless the illegality--as with flagrant atrocities--would be immediately obvious to any-one. But these criteria are often in conflict and at odds with the law's underlying principles and policies. Combat and peace op-erations now depend more on tactical imagination, self-disci-pline, and loyalty to immediate comrades than on immediate, unreflective adherence to the letter of superiors' orders, backed by threat of formal punishment. The objective of military law is to encourage deliberative judgment. This can be done, Osiel sug-gests, in ways that enhance the accountability of our military forces, in both peace operations and more traditional conflicts, while maintaining their effectiveness. Osiel seeks to "civilianize" military law while building on sol-diers' own internal ideals of professional virtuousness. He re-turns to the ancient ideal of martial honor, reinterpreting it in light of new conditions, arguing that it should be implemented through realistic training in which legal counsel plays an en-larged role rather than by threat of legal

About this title

Review:

[Osiel] argues with passion for the legal and practical possibility of doing better than the present legal standard in encouraging moral responsibility in officers and individual soldiers. In the end, Osiel transcends the genre of legal analysis entirely to ground his ethical appeal in the very nature and basis of the military profession itself. - Martin Cook, Naval Law Review

About the Author:

Mark Osiel is professor of law at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Mass Atrocity. Collective Memory, and the Law.

About this edition

• Publisher: Transaction Publishers
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 076580798X
• ISBN 13: 9780765807984
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 408