If one is to serve the state as a thinking military officer, one must serve the state as it is, not the fantasy state of America’s highest ideals and ambitions.What with marines selling their stories, the problem the media has criticizing serving soldiers, or exercising the type of disinterested realism (call it impartiality or objectivity) that might offend the families of dead servicemen and women. What with all that, I find myself thinking about the moral problems of military service.

As usual I rely on other people to think for me, in this case Martin Cook, who is a philosophy professor at the United States Air Force Academy. Cook wrote this back in 2000, before the invasion of Iraq. There’s a chunk below – but the whole thing is a powerful counter to the pat dismissal of the military, and also to the two-dimensional portrayal of soldiers as heroes or villains.

Morally serious and thoughtful military officers feel a deep tension in the moral basis of their profession … [W]hile producing excellence of character and virtue, the military exists to serve the will of the political leadership of a particular state.

The military will, at times, be employed for less-than- grand purposes in the service of that state. If ethics at its highest is about universal human values, such as the equal moral and spiritual value of every human being, how can that be manifested by serving to advance the interests of the very partial human community of a single nation?

Clearly there is a tension between these highest and universal ethical ideals and the reality that the military serves particular states and their political leaders. If we believe Clausewitz‘s judgment that war is a continuation of politics by other means, the real purpose of military leadership is simply to serve the national interest.

Viewed in this perspective, all the rhetoric about the high moral purposes of military service constitutes a verbal smoke screen behind which lurks an unpleasant truth: It is functional to persuade individuals to think about military service in such moral terms, but such talk only makes it psychologically easier to evade the true reality that military people and organizations exist solely to serve the tribal interests of the state. And since states are engaged in a constant struggle to advance their interests and to diminish those of other states, there is little here to be seen as truly morally grand.

Of course we would probably disguise this reality by invocation of ideas of the “self-defense” of the state. But such talk is vague. We know the core meaning of “self-defense”: self-defense is when we fend off someone who is attacking us personally or, extended to the state, when we resist a border incursion or protect the lives of fellow citizens in peril. In that narrow and relatively precise sense, all but absolute pacifists grant there is a right to self-defense.

But it requires considerable conceptual sleight-of-hand to extend the concept of self-defense to foreign interventions – whether humanitarian or imperial – and to balance-of-power wars. Only rarely do militaries (especially the US military) fight in wars that genuinely defend national political sovereignty and territorial integrity. Typically our wars serve something considerably broader and vaguer than strict self-defense would imply, something expressed in terms of national interests or important national values.

So we are now prepared to focus the fundamental question: What is the moral basis of states themselves that justifies our fighting to advance their interests? Certainly, one might argue, it is only human individuals who make moral claims on us, and the use of force and violence might be justified only in the defense of such individuals. So why should anyone be willing to kill and die for the state, an entity which is, after all, a relatively artificial construct, an abstraction?

If citizens, politicians, reporters and editors could be persuaded to treat the military as thoughtfully the world might not be a better place, but it might be a better understood place. And that’s a start.