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The Morality of Surrender	Andrew G. Webb
	Jan 27, 2004 13:41 PST

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For those intellectuals here who have debated the philosophy behind war
--
http://www.nd.edu/~theo/jhy/writings/justwar/surrender.htm
--
Andrew Webb
Wildwood Crest, NJ USA

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” – Benjamin
Franklin (1755)

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IS THERE A DUTY TO GO DOWN FIGHTING? THE MORALITY
OF SURRENDER 
 
 
 


John Howard Yoder, unpublished, 1990. Also available as a "Working
Paper" from the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace
Studies, Notre Dame. Cf. "Surrender: A Moral Imperative" in The
Review of Politics, Notre Dame, IN, Vol 48 No 4, Fall 1986, pp.
576-595. 
 
 
 


My objective in the lines which follow is not to make a new point,
but to interpret, for the sake of its importance in the JSCOPE
context<A HREF="#N_1_">(1)</A>, a classical moral
conviction. As I shall soon indicate, the point in question was made
clearly a good generation ago by the most authoritative moral
theologians of our century. It has never been refuted, on the level
on which they argued it. Nonetheless it runs counter to some standard
themes of our pop culture. As I strip down the debate to the main
point I shall first need to name and to set aside some related
important issues. 
 


The position I here describe is not my own. I am functioning here
as historian, or perhaps as journalist, or as translator. I shall be
interpreting a body of ideas from the mainstream legal and moral
tradition which has dominated Western thought (at least
theoretically) since the fourth century, namely the so-called "Just
War Tradition." 
 


The basic concept of limited hostilities 
 


What that tradition says is that the moral validity of the waging
of war is subject to measurement, by applying several quite clear
criteria. These are really criteria: that is to say that you
can in fact measure with them. Morally, you must measure with them.
If in a given case a particular cause for war, a particular strategy,
a particular use of a particular weapon measures up, it is morally
and legally valid to use it. 
 


I have just referred here to the distinction between the legal and
the moral. The "legal" is the level where we measure a policy, an
act, or a decision by a given body of laws; the "moral" level is the
one where we measure by the responsibility of the decider or the
actor to respect principles which may or may not have been defined by
legislation. It is not our present concern to pursue this
distinction, nor to ask about how the detailed rules on each level
have varied from one culture, one time, one place, to another. "Just
War" reasoning applies on both the moral and the legal levels. In
western democracies, in the major bodies of religious moral thought,
and in modern international relations the two levels tend to
approximate one another, and reasonable moral persons want them to
coincide. In the rest of this overview I shall assume we are
concerned with both. 
 


But what if a given war, or a given possible tactic in a
particular setting, does not measure up? Then the answer is
clear, according to the mainline tradition. That war must not be
waged, that strategy must be renounced, that weapon must not be used.
To override that rejection would be morally a sin, legally a crime.
If there is no way, legitimate and probably successful, to achieve a
just political goal by war, without recourse to that wrong means,
then that war, or that weapon, must be renounced. The right thing to
do is to sue for peace. 
 


The word "surrender", which the authorities use here, may appear
too strong. There are various ways of not winning, when one cannot
win morally and legally. There is a great difference between
abandoning sovereignty over one's homeland and pulling back from an
overseas adventure. There would be various levels of honorable and
tolerable compromise available, well short of total destruction.
Especially would such honorable non-victorious alternatives be
available if strategic and political wisdom would discern the
impossibility of victory well in advance, rather than hiding that
hard truth under falsely optimistic rhetoric such as that used two
decades ago about the light at the end of the tunnel in Viet Nam.
"Surrender" does not mean rout: it means an honorable negotiation of
the best possible terms for terminating a conflict which one cannot
win without betraying the principles of legality or of morality that
apply in the case. All that counts for present purposes is the
principle of accepting, when that is the case, the impossibility of
winning morally. The rest follows. 
 


The Jesuit moral theologian John Courtney Murray and the Methodist
Princeton University professor Paul Ramsey, without question the two
most respected thinkers of their age on this subject in their
respective faith families, both made this point in the late 1950's,
independently, with specific reference to all-out nuclear war. For
both of them, the most evident case of an inadmissible war was the
massive destruction of an urban population, because of the direct and
intentional destruction of innocent lives. If that is the only way to
win, it is morally and legally wrong to win. Then it is right not to
win. Both Murray and Ramsey used the word "surrender" in the sober
way being described here<A HREF="#N_2_">(2)</A>. 
 


Moral Theological Leadership Three Decades Ago 
 


The present paper is not concerned to focus upon the nuclear
threat as such, or upon its international policy context. It just
happened that in the 1950's a massive counter-population nuclear
attack was the first point where these thinkers had to face the
concept of a war one cannot morally or legally win. The nuclear
threshold is not only quantitative, in the unprecedented scale of the
destruction; it is also qualitative in that the notion of a
deterrent use of disproportionate threats makes the question
of the immorality/illegality of the weapon reach back from when it is
fired to when its use is threatened. If however tomorrow some
bacteriological or chemical weapon, or some hand-to-hand tactic, or
some style of mopping-up in low-intensity warfare, were to be
identified as illicit, the formal question would be the same. 
 


"Surrender" in real life 
 


I have here described the challenge in terms of a war which could
not be won legally and morally, i.e. within the conditions of the
just war tradition, because this is a meeting on ethics. Yet it would
be a distortion to think that only the moralist raises such
questions. The "realist" does not believe either in continuing
hopeless combat<A HREF="#N_3_">(3)</A>. There has always
been such a notion as "honorable defeat"<A HREF="#N_4_">(4)</A>.
To sue for peace has always been a possible concrete strategic
necessity. Most people who surrender are not pacifists; they are
combatants who know their cause is lost at a particular time. 
 


Two real-life specimens, far enough in the past to be remembered
somewhat objectively, may concretize the issue. The first was
referred to as a matter of (then) very recent memory by John Courtney
Murray in his 1958 paper. As his basic point, Murray was arguing: 
 


"on grounds of the moral principle of proportion the [just
war] doctrine supports the grave recommendation of the greatest
theorist of war in modern times, von Klausewitz: 'We must
...familiarize ourselves with the thought of an honorable
defeat.'<A HREF="#N_5_">(5)</A> "

Then, coming closer home, Murray added: 
 


"Conversely, the doctrine condemns the hysteria that swept
Washington in August when the Senate voted, eighty to two, to deny
government funds to any person or institution who ever proposes or
actually conducts any study regarding the 'surrender of the
government of the US.'" 
 


"Surrender" in the Senate 
 


"Hysteria" is the word for what dominated the US Senate in the
second week of August 1958. A retired brigadier general had written
in the St Louis Post Dispatch that three scientific research
institutions were studying, on behalf of the Department of Defense,
whether the US could continue fighting after a massive Soviet nuclear
attack. A headline writer translated this into "Whether the United
States Should Surrender". Missouri's Senator Symington read this
article into the Congressional Record for August 8th, 1958, where
President Eisenhower first read it and, as some journalists later
said, was angrier than he had ever been.<A HREF="#N_6_">(6)</A> 
 


The Senate did not seriously get to the bottom of the issue.
Senator Symington was using the matter to press his political case
against the Eisenhower government, under attack just then for not
increasing the arms budget adequately and for having sent the Marines
into Lebanon. 
 


Georgia's Senator Richard Russell could have had the matter
checked out through the investigative authority of his Armed Services
Committee, but instead he chose a flamboyant action, not dependent on
fact-finding, to silence the debate. He attached to a pending
appropriations bill an amendment forbidding the use of any public
funds to support any studies of the possibility of surrender. Russell
argued that since the Constitution does not say who can surrender on
behalf of the nation, no-one can. The Senate passed the amendment by
a vote of 88 to 2. It became law as Sec. 1602, Chapter XVI, of the
Supplemental Appropriations Act of 1959" and was codified at 50 USCS
sec. 407. 
 


I'll have to leave to the lawyers and the legal historians and
military scientists to ask whether in fact all of the contingency
scenario projecting done by all military educators and strategists
since then has counted only on victory. 
 


Some of the background to the flurry was a study that had just
been done for the Rand Corporation, on the strategic lessons to be
learned from the surrenders of France, Italy, Germany, and Japan in
World War II<A HREF="#N_7_">(7)</A>. That study cast some
doubt on the practical wisdom - to say nothing of the morality or the
legality - of the stated American war aim which as we know had been
the demand for "unconditional surrender"<A HREF="#N_8_">(8)</A>.
Thereby the Rand study supported John Courtney Murray's polemic
against "all or nothing" rhetoric. Yet that Rand study had said
nothing about the United States surrendering, and nothing about the
nuclear threat. The four cases studied had by no means dealt with
settings where the country in question could have prevailed by
continuing belligerency even by resort to illegal or immoral action,
so that the imperative of suing for peace would have resulted from
the impossibility of winning legally and morally. In all four,
winning had become impossible tactically and strategically. So the
subject of that research was not the same as Murray's. Yet the
motivation for being afraid to think honestly about surrender might
be the same. 
 


The story of that hectic week in August would be worth recounting
for other reasons, but for our purposes it suffices to have seen it
demonstrated in our highest legislature that the very mention of the
word "surrender" can put an end to serious contingency thinking about
costs and benefits. 
 


"Surrender" on the high seas 
 


On 23 January 1968, just ten days after leaving port on his and
his ship's first investigative mission, Commander Lloyd J. Bucher
found himself surrounded by six North Korean warships summoning him
to follow them into the port of Wonsan. Bucher did not formally
surrender, but he apparently thought of no alternatives to letting
his ship be boarded and commandeered. The Pueblo was not equipped in
such a way that either scuttling her or destroying the
security-sensitive material was possible. Those were the futile
alternatives Bucher was thinking about when boarded. 
 


After the fact, many argued that even though pitifully outgunned
(since the spy ship pose included claiming to be an unarmed
scientific research vessel) Bucher and his men should have resisted
capture, and if need be should have gone down fighting, rather than
accept the pain and the shame of capture and of their ordeal as
prisoners. His instructions from the Pentagon had made no provision
for any such eventuality. The mistake of thinking that such a North
Korean aggression could not arise was not his. 
 


The Pueblo story is full of lessons about how not to run a spy
operation, or how not to run a navy, but again that is not our
concern. What it demonstrates is that the setting where surrender of
one kind or another is an option is by no means hypothetical, and
that a strong and sincere field commander may very well find himself
unprepared to face it. 
 


I do not propose to pursue critically either of these events, with
regard to what they teach us about military ethics education. It
would be illuminating to do so. What education had Bucher received in
the laws of war? Why did President Eisenhower respond so angrily to
the notion of contingency planning for undesirable cases, or to the
possibility that after a successful Soviet first strike against the
US there could be little point to the notion of going on to win? But
this is not the place for such studies. I have cited the two cases
here only to document the relevance of my subject; it is not a merely
speculative intellectual enterprise. 
 


Practical Conclusions in Military Education 
 
There will be several right answers, according to cases, to the
question on what level of decision responsibility the duty to sue for
peace is located. What Murray and Ramsey had in mind was a decision
on the national level, because the unacceptable means needing to be
renounced was an intercontinental nuclear second strike. Therefore
the decision to sue for peace was also the duty of the national
Commander in Chief. National policy is also the level on which the
continuing national dialogue on the nuclear agenda must go on, which
the nation's Roman Catholic bishops in 1983 and the Methodist bishops
in 1986 called for<A HREF="#N_9_">(9)</A>

In other possible cases the weighing of the stakes, the
probability of success, and the illegitimacy of some specific means,
and then by consequence the duty to cease hostilities might need to
be located on a battlefield level. Commander Bucher had neither the
opportunity nor the obligation to check with Washington about how to
respond. In any case, battlefield or national or between, the moral
and legal issue is the same. 
 


The issue which arises for the instructional duties of JSCOPE
members applies to both levels, the national and the tactical, in
different ways. In the case where a decision to terminate hostilities
would need to be made locally<A HREF="#N_10_">(10)</A>, it
is the military educator who can and should provide to the person
destined to make future difficult command decisions the wherewithall
for deciding rightly. 
 


In the national case, where the decision to cease hostilities
should properly be made higher on the chain of command, it will be of
the utmost importance that subordinate bearers of command
responsibility be ready to support and interpret that decision of
their superiors, if it should be made in favor of restraint, for it
is sure not to be popular at those many other points, at home and in
the armed forces, where the hopelessness or the wrongness of the
enterprise would not yet have become clear. 
 


We now move from the introductory survey of the terrain to the
basic educational question. What should a student of military ethics,
preparing for service in a position of potential combat command
responsibility, know about the limits of war's justification? What
are the concepts, the mental tools which would enable a
decision-maker under pressure to resist critically the pop macho
slogans of "winning at all costs" or of never giving up? I suggest
that what is needed includes five levels. 
 


Curriculum Components? 
 


The most general level is that of the basic moral concepts. Do we
intend to teach, as a matter of principle, that the moral
justification of war has limits? That the slogan "victory at any
cost" is immoral? Do we understand this limitedness of the value of
concrete military objectives not as disloyalty, nor as doubt, but as
part of the integrity of what we are fighting for? Do we honor
restraint as a trait of a leader's character? 
 


The second level is that of the specific restraints pertinent to
the mode and level of conflict we are concerned with. Do we
effectively teach the content of the treaties and customs to which
the United States is formally committed? Do we understand and
interpret them not merely as phrases but as expressing a deep and
binding moral logic?<A HREF="#N_11_">(11)</A> 
 


A third level would be that of operational guidelines. Do there
exist policy directives within the civilian government or within the
jurisdiction of the Department of Defense, defining who is
responsible, and when, to assess the morality and legality of a
policy or of a procedure? What is the right procedure with which to
respond if one receives an unjust order?<A HREF="#N_12_">(12)</A>
What is the procedure whereby to make and report a costly decision
when one discovers that the facts of the case, as they are knowable
only in the field, do not correspond to the assumptions made in one's
orders? What protection is there against the ordinary temptations of
passing the buck upward and of covering for one's subordinates? Where
in the standard officer training curricula are these things
taught? 
 


A fourth level would be effective and credible monitoring of
compliance, and the prosecution of non-compliance. The breakdown on
this level, in the My Lai case, both the initial cover-up and the
series of decisions not to prosecute after the facts were out, is
perhaps a worse indictment than the fact that the original atrocity
occurred<A HREF="#N_13_">(13)</A>. 
 


A fifth level would be that of public support for "just war"
restraints, both in civilian government and in the population at
large. A morally responsible national citizenry should wish its
representatives in government and in the armed forces to respect the
rule of law, including the wrongfulness of continuing hostilities
beyond the point of possible victory by legitimate means. The flurry
in the Senate in 1958 and the widespread condemnation of Bucher in
1968 indicate that that is far from being the case. 
 


This is not a question addressed only to the teachers in JCSOPE;
it is the business of the public schools, of the media, and of the
churches and synagogues, to say nothing of the organs of government,
to make meaningful the notion that war must be limited, because this
limitation is a necessary counterpart of the truth that all human
beings, including those beyond our borders, share in the same human
dignity. 
 
 
 
 
 


<A NAME="N_1_"></A>1. Presented before the Joint Services
Conference on Professional Ethics, National Defense University, 12
January 1990.

<A NAME="N_2_"></A>2. I summarize both statements more fully in my
article "Surrender: A Moral Imperative" in The Review of
Politics, Notre Dame, IN, Vol 48 No 4, Fall 1986, pp. 576-595.
Paul Ramsey said this in his book War and the Christian
Conscience (Durham. Duke University Press, 1961, p. 151f.) and in
numerous articles. He had begun making the point less formally in
1959. Murray wrote it first in "Theology and Modern War", in the
Jesuit journal Theological Studies, vol 20 (1959) pp 40-61,
also reprinted as pamphlet and anthologized. My article reviews as
well the parallel and contemporary thought of other Christian moral
thinkers outside the United States. I made the same point more
briefly in my When War is Unjust: Being Honest in Just-War
Thinking;1984, Agusburg, Minneapolis, pp. 64ff.

<A NAME="N_3_"></A>3. S. below Murray's quote from Klausewitz.

<A NAME="N_4_"></A>4. Not many would hold that Lee was wrong in
surrendering to Grant, or that Wainwright was wrong in not fighting
to the last man at Corregidor.

<A NAME="N_5_"></A>5. Murray did not cite the particular source of
his quote; it clearly had for him the status of a dictum. The phrase
does not appear verbatim as chapter or paragraph heading in the 1976
Princeton edition of von Clausewitz' On War (Translators
Michael Howard and Peter Paret) nor in the commentary by Bernard
Brodie, even though the point it makes is implied throughout the
work.

<A NAME="N_6_"></A>6. 6. Some of the record of these debates
remains in the Congressional Record. Cf. the index under
"Department of Defense: Surrender" in Vol 104 Part 16, 85th Congress,
Second Session, p. 179. I am grateful for research assistance from
Rev. Laurel Jordan and from John Robinson and Dwight King of the
Notre Dame College of Law.

<A NAME="N_7_"></A>7. Paul Kecskemeti, Strategic Surrender,
Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 1958

<A NAME="N_8_"></A>8. As a matter of fact, defining "Unconditional
Surrender" as a stated war aim seems to have had only a slim
administrative base. It was first expressed by President Roosevelt at
the Casablanca conference of the allied leaders; but that is said to
have occurred in a press conference, not in the communique' to which
Churchill

and Stalin had agreed.

<A NAME="N_9_"></A>9. The Challenge of Peace, National
Conference of Catholic Bishops, Washington, D.C., 1986: In Defense
of Creation, The United Methodist Council of Bishops, Nashville,
Graded Press, 1986. Although the writers of both of these documents,
as well as their respective constituencies, considered them to be
radical, seeing in them a threat to the nation's present strategic
arms policies, neither text was clear about the morally acceptable
alternative to unacceptable nuclear war. Each text says that
first-strike or second-strike use of nuclear weapons would be wrong;
but neither gets around to what a morally responsible government
should do instead in the worst case.

<A NAME="N_10_"></A>10. The 1957 Code of Conduct for Members of
the Armed Forces (Navy General Order No 4 of March 18, 1957,
presidential Executive order 10631 of August 17, 1955) says: "If in
command I will never surrender my men while they still have the means
to resist". For that promise to correspond to legality and morality
we must assume that it means: "...while they have the means to resist
with some chance of success and within the limits of the provisions
of international law."

<A NAME="N_11_"></A>11. Donald Wells, War Crimes and Laws of
War, University Press, 1984, pp 106-7 and 118, quotes the Dellums
Committee report, The Citizens' Commission of Inquiry, Random
House, New York, 1972, pp 10-12, to the effect that pre-Vietnam
officer training did not adequately include instruction about the
limits of obedience, even though all the rules were there on paper
(Cf. also Lt Gen W. R. Peers, The My Lai Inquiry Norton, New
York, 1979, pp. 229ff., "Factors Contributing to the Tragedy")
Changes implemented since the late 1970's have brought about
significant improvement here. It would be reassuring to the citizenry
if the facts to that effect were more publicly available.

<A NAME="N_12_"></A>12. "This brings us to one of the most serious
overall problems in dealing with the tragedy of My Lai, and that is
the subject of illegal orders. Very little was said on this subject
in regulations and training manuals, and what was said was couched in
terms that only a lawyer could understand. On the one hand, a soldier
was told not to obey an order that was manifestly illegal, but was
provided with only very limited guidance as to what he was to do in
such a case. On the other hand: he was instructed that if he
disobeyed (or refused to obey) an order it was at his own risk, and
he could be subject to disciplinary action if he did so. This left
the solder in a dilemma....To whom should a soldier report a war
crime when his immediate commander was personally involved in the
conduct of the crime? Obviously, the entire approach to the problem
of illegal orders needed review, clarification, and improvement."
Peers, op. cit., p.33.

<A NAME="N_13_"></A>13. Peers, op. cit. 225ff. and 253ff. reminds
us that the breakdown of discipline was not limited to the armed
forces. It reached as high as the White House. For this reason
General Peers did not advocate that the duty to monitor war crimes be
simply civilianized.

 
 
Return to <A HREF="../home/ind-jw.htm">Just War Index. 
 
</A>Return to <A HREF="../home/welcome.htm#N_8">General Topic
Headings.</A>
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