Review: The Moral Dilemma of Military Psychology

Reviewed Work(s): War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology by
Peter Watson
Review by: Perry London
Source: The Hastings Center Report , Dec., 1979, Vol. 9, No. 6 (Dec., 1979), pp. 42-44
Published by: The Hastings Center
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3561674

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 REVIE/WS

The Moral Dilemma of Military Psychology

by PERRY LONDON

War On The Mind: The Military Uses studies, mostly done over the past two for purposes of camouflage, firing effi-
and Abuses of Psychology. By Peter decades by 146 separate institutions. Most ciency or morale, with or without tank
Watson. New York: Basic Books, of this literature is published in technical cover? Or who can be expected to respond
1978. 534 pp. $17.50. reports; but much of it is classified, includ- to interrogation or torture in the event of
ing over 40 percent of the titles listed in capture? Or who make the best candidates
the United States Department of Defense for committing atrocities? Or assassina-
Bibliography. Very little of this research tions? The great majority of military psy-
has been reported in the standard social chology studies have not been concerned
cience and technology have always and behavioral science journals, so most with such dust-jacket melodramatics, but
lent themselves to war, and we are all so of it is unfamiliar even to psychologists with the conventional aspects of conven-
used to it that only dramatic noveltiesworking in relevant areas unless they have tional warfare like training and combat.
make us raise our eyebrows or ask ethical themselves been personally involved in This more technical and less colorful re-
questions. TNT, gas warfare, the atomic military projects. Some of the classified search is, on the whole, more reliable,
bomb, ICBMs, and neutron bombs may documents were made directly available to more important, and more subtle. Did you
represent such shocking novelties of this Watson. Summaries of many others have know, for instance, that while everyone's
past century. But long ago guns and can- been published in official "limited distri- marksmanship deteriorates under the stress
bution bibliographies," and comparing of being shot back at, the accuracy of shots
nons, or earlier still, armor, cavalry, char-
iots, and bows and arrows may have had them with related unclassified documents fired from the shoulder remains higher
the same effects. All these have long sinceenabled Watson to put two and two to- than that of shots fired from other posi-
been forgiven, as have their inventors- gether in reaching general conclusions. tions? This means that soldiers should
Nobel, Leonardo, and Archimedes are re- His generalities are specific enough to shoot more from the shoulder, especially
membered for finer things than their mar- inform readers who want a thorough over- at night, because fewer shots will not only
tial inventions. view of military psychology. The book's give the same accuracy but will also re-
On reflection, it should be no surprise twenty-five chapters cover five major top- duce the chances of giving away their po-
that psychology should also become a tool ics: (1) Combat, the longest section, dis- sition from gun flashes. Night sights on
of warfare-like physics, chemistry, and cusses studies of personnel selection and rifles also improve people's aim in the
biology-once it too entered the realm training,
of group behavior, leadership and dark, but at the cost of reducing their dark-
science and technology. It may be surpris- command skills, and the use of animals in adaptation ability and giving them head-
ing, however, to find that it has done so war;
in (2) Stress summarizes studies of aches. Most people probably do not know
a great flood of research mostly since stress tolerance and desensitizing or (anyhow, I did not) that the general con-
World War II. Peter Watson, a British "battleproofing" soldiers, psychological clusion of psychologists, from all such
psychologist and journalist, has docu- effects of weapons, psychiatric battle cas- weapons studies, is that armies would be
mented most of this move in a book that is ualties and treatments, and atrocity re- more combat efficient if they trained
so comprehensive, clear, and balanced in search; (3) The Determinants of Loyalty soldiers to use their weapons fairly well,
its views that it will become the standard and Treason reviews the literature on cap- but not as marksmen. Generals, still aim
work on this topic. ture, interrogation, imprisonment, and for marksmanship, despite the evidence.
"brainwashing"; (4) Survival is a one- This is not to say that the generals gener-
chapter synthesis of reports ranging from ally disregard the behavioral scientists. In
Reviewing the Literature
submariner isolation and arctic perils to most respects, they do listen, change train-
War on the Mind: The Military Uses the aftermath of atomic attacks. Finally, ing and combat procedures accordingly,
(5) The Psychology of Counter-Insur- and are pleased to have done so. "Psychol-
and Abuses of Psychology is a critical re-
view of research literature on every aspect gency deals with guerrilla warfare and the ogy has always been more important in
of military psychology. It is not a small many ways in which military forces can be military affairs than many people have
literature. Watson found more than 7,500 used against both civilian and combatant been prepared to give it credit for," says
revolutionaries. Watson. He estimates that average mili-
PERRY LONDON is professor of psychol- It is hard to sum up the sheer load of tary performance has been improved by
ogy, psychiatry and behavior science at information in these five hundred pages, the results of all the studies of combat
the University of Southern California and without boring you, or even to catalogue taken together on the order of 25 percent,
lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medi- very many of the useful things psycholo- even more if you count the time saved in
cal School. He lives in Israel and teaches gists have discovered and Watson has re- training by the use of programmed instruc-
at the University of Tel Aviv and the He- ported about war. Would you like to know tion. In effect, this means that without the
brew University of Jerusalem. how best to distribute small combat teams benefits of this knowledge the United

42 Hastings Center Report, December 1979

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States Army would need about 200,000 And he tries to spell out the specific issues, first place? In fairness, some of their stud-
more soldiers than it has to get the sameto define "what is an abuse" in the design ies have seriously explored what kinds of
job done. and practice of military psychology, and to people are likely to commit atrocities; but
The book is chock-full of this kind of draw conclusions that pull the book to- learning how to reduce their likelihood by
information, dispensed clearly, fairly, gether. Here he falters. Watson's insights such means also tells us how to increase it.
sometimes understated, never excessive. are good, but they do not fully come to And this is first cousin to research on how
"Glamor" topics like brainwashing and grips with the meaning of his unrest about to find a good assassin-type, as assassina-
dolphin training get their due, but no this topic. Nor with mine. tion itself-certainly political assassina-
more. This book is first-rate reporting. tion, despite all the squeamish pieties to
The Political Aspects the contrary-is blood kin to war, indeed
Assessing the Research much closer than it is to simple murder.
The problem starts with what seems
But how does one tote up the score of largely a technical issue-secrecy. The The Context of a Moral Stance
what it reports? Given the ghastly mechan- dangers of secrecy are sometimes greater
ics of war, does psychology's contribution than the dangers of exposure. The secret This kind of fact, I think, starts to bring
make it more horrible or more humane? protected by classifying a research project home how military psychology unsettles.
There is no neat technical answer, it turns may be that the studies involved are It stimulates, even compels, realization of
out, just as there is no neat ethical answer shabby scientific work whose publication the dismal truth that context is everything
to whether or not people should be doing would make a laughingstock of the people in almost everyone's moral stance toward
such research in the first place; or where, who did them. Making things secret re- war, that no moral imperatives stand up
once into it, they should draw the line at duces the number of potential critics. But logically unless they condemn all war
what they study, or on whom; or what they for that very reason, secrecy gives cover to everywhere always. What it means other-
reveal, or to whom. corruption as well as to stupidity, because wise to speak of making its effects "no
Watson himself resorts to a kind of sta- the lack of controls over people who carry worse than they have to be," as Watson
tistically based ethical position from out policy allows them, willy nilly, to says, depends entirely on who's talking.
which, on balance, military psychology create it. Ex-CIA agent John Stockwell, He knows it, and says so elsewhere: "Sci-
comes out a pretty good thing. Most of its who directed American operations in An- entific and political questions cannot be
studies, he says, are "defensive ... gola, says in his book In Search of En- kept apart." So the only "pure" way to
aimed at conserving life . . . at making emies (New York: Norton, 1978) that this deal with the scientific questions is to dis-
conventional war safer." "The more de- kind of corruption has become so endemic regard the political ones. It makes for ugly
fensive uses of military psychology," he in the CIA that the nation would be better reading.
concludes, "have a crucial part to play in served if its clandestine operations were We all think we share a special revul-
helping to ensure that the effects of con- entirely eliminated. Military psychologists sion for the abusive application of behav-
flict are no worse than they have to be." It have not, so far, orchestrated such massive ior control technology against personal
is a sensible argument. It is also a moot political fiascoes, but Watson argues that privacy, individual liberties, and so forth.
issue, just as it would be useless to discuss its secrecy has nonetheless "allowed mili- Deceiving old people to inject them with
the relative ethics of spears versus ba-tary psychology to turn itself into a crude, cancer cells revives the image of Ausch-
zookas among projectile weapons. In war, ad hoc, political psychology. .. " witz and Dr. Mengele's "experiments."
what wins is what matters; what's proof is More unsettling even than secrecy, CIA abominations with LSD and mental
what wins. Psychology helps to win, so ithowever, is the bureaucratization of the patients at once revolt our deepest moral
is here to stay. Q.E.D. political aspects of military psychology. sensibilities and insult our intelligence.
The discussion does not quite end there. The people who do it see themselves not as But suppose that what we think is moral
What it has not yet said is that there is political apparatchiks, but as engineers depth was really the flatness of context-
something discomforting about the whole who happen to work in a more unpleasant and that in turn reduced to no more than
subject of military psychology. I felt it context than most of us. Some of them, how we, and those around us, felt at the
reading the book; Watson felt it writing it. like C. Ackroyd and his colleagues, write time. Most of us feel that scientific selec-
He tries to explain his disquiet in the con- books titled The Technology of Political tion of astronauts is all right, but not of
text of Watergate and "CIA capers with Control (Penguin, 1977), equally useful, assassins. The plot against Castro, we say,
LSD" and "bizarre activities in many one trusts, to all sides of all contests. They was the CIA's evil implementation of the
Third World countries," the brutality of talk about "psywar" and "psyops" (op- Kennedy brothers' private obsession. But
the British in Northern Ireland, and "the portunities for psychological warfare) and we still commemorate and honor the gen-
shadow of the Vietnam War," all of which how to train assassins. Lightly? Are these erals' failed plot to kill Hitler, though it
produce "anti-military reactions" in many people like Nazi bureaucrats making ar- was motivated by nothing more noble than
of us. He recognizes that the material on rangements to cart Jews off to slaughter, the wish to cut their losses. And the OSS,
counter-insurgency is somehow at the more exemplars of Hannah Arendt's "ba- and A Man Called Intrepid, are among the
heart of the trouble because "of the moral, nality of evil"? Are they people who begin heroics we still celebrate of World War II.
political and professional controversies as something different than what they have It is a question of who one thinks are the
raised by the studies. . . . The theme they become, who learn to do experiments on good guys and bad guys and, among the
share is the link between military psychol- what had been unthinkable only because latter, how bad one thinks they are.
ogy, political psychology and politics." they had to start thinking about it in the When the question moves from the

The Hastings Center 43

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abuse or murder of individuals to one of was plainly the worst guy in the shootout. But it is a mistake to make too much a
war and revolution, the rules for scru- Angola, Ethiopia, Korea, and endless special case of the moral issues of insur-
pulosity and moral revulsion change, but elsewheres offer, and will offer, endless gency or of psychology in connection with
our personal training does not. So, we more instances of the same awful ambigu-it. War is a social, not an individual in-
learn to shift moral gears. The rules of ity. The world has changed that way, and stitution; an instrumental device, not an
"groupthink," as Irving Janis calls it in will not foreseeably change back. emotional expression; a statement of pol-
Victims of Groupthink (1973), now require But insurgencies, like most civil wars, icy, not of personality. The moral ques-
that we identify with "the illusion ofare like holy wars in the very respect that tions it informs are all tragic questions for
morality" that characterizes "our side," makes them most terrible-they are more individuals, that is, moral dilemmas for
and now rationalize, indeed apotheosize, bitter, endless, and unlimited than "civi- which no satisfying resolution is possible
what we have been taught to condemn. lized" warfare. When political establish- and for which some operation is always
Most of us do not mind doing so tooments fight, their warfare involves some necessary. All war. Even "just" war.
much, provided we can be sure who "our extension of diplomacy; they arrange ma-
side" is and that we are the good guys. But chinery for truces, for prisoners. There is a
that is precisely what Americans, first homogeneity of ultimate assumptions on Pondering this book and this essay for
among citizens of the free world, have hadboth sides, an implicit agreement on somemonths, it is odd to complete them during
more and more trouble doing ever since minimum scenario of the aftermath in the Jewish Days of Awe, a grave religious
the end of World War II. And that is pre-which, regardless who wins, the losers season of Remembrance, Judgment, and
cisely what becomes so disconcertingmay survive and reconstruct their lives. Penitence. Sitting in the synagogue of this
about military psychology as it stops talk- Even the Allies' demand for unconditional charming Jerusalem neighborhood, watch-
ing about camouflage and marksmanship surrender in World War II made that as- ing my gentle, pious neighbor quietly re-
and gets into counter-insurgency and pop- sumption rather than simply vowing to de- move his prayer shawl, snap the clip into
ulation control and morale: it glossesstroy Germany and Japan. In the contests his M-1 Carbine (identical with one I
blithely over the connection between warof political establishments, destruction and learned, some wars back, in the United
and politics as if the questions of politicalsuffering are more often instrumental com- States Army Medical Service, after hear-
morality had already been answered, as ifmodities in a political futures market than ing the Geneva Convention rules for bear-
it was evident who the good guys were! ends in their own right. ing defensive arms), and go outside to
In fact, combat does the same thing, and This is less true of insurgencies, at least stand guard against bicycle bombs or
much more resolutely. Camouflage and less evident. They are given to "Masada worse-I feel that I know much too little
marksmanship and bombing and shooting plans," that is, to doomsday strategies in about the operations of things like coun-
people are also undertaken as if the ques- which "total war" (unlike our World War ter-insurgency and all too much about the
tions of political morality had already beenII statement) means just that-there are no ethics. The immediacy of the problem is
answered. Military psychology is more conditions under which losing can be tol- no apology for cruelty and no brief for sit-
noticeable in part simply because it is erated. This makes both sides more ruth- uational ethics. But it leads to a sense of
newer. But more important, I think, is that less, more relentless, more murderous, deep sadness and painful clarity. The busi-
it was developed mainly for the wrong more cunning. In the war of ideologues ness of war is killing, destruction and (spe-
wars. If we had the right enemy at the right (racial wars are included in this group), the cial bow to psychology) manipulation, all
time, I fear we could drop all the napalm champions may be the only survivors. as instrumental to some absolutely coer-
we wished and firebomb all the Dresdens These are the worst wars, and the most cive social purpose. It is war's only busi-
that would bum without much outcry. likely ones, as the world now turns. ness. All the rest is commentary.
Maybe not. Decent, well-socialized, con-
scientious, ethically minded Americans
have not, in any case, really had a war
they believed in, heart and soul, since
1945. And they are not likely to have one
again soon, nor to be ready for one psy-
chologically if a suitable villain should
turn up. Their trust in the integrity, intelli- IR1B is a fort for commiunicating informationi andideas abut the ethical
gence, and decency of their own leaders, ac, rarcinvg human bje. sisn r ebers and
perhaps of everyone in positions of power, istaff tnalr ards ( ,adminir , law-
of authority, has eroded too sharply. yer s, inestdn t esal, legal; an ivea
The lack of a "just" war, or a "holy" probem- of reseac. .
war, to use the apposite term from the sis-
ter religions, makes us especially am- date n o h egulto bot bibliog-
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measures, psychological or otherwise, be-
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Haings -nHdo NY.1706
gent authorities suspect. Americans have
still not figured out whether Castro was a
good guy or a bad guy, even when Batista

44 Hastings Center Report, December 1979

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