Small Wars Journal

New Publication: Grey Zone Ethics: A Practitioners Guide to Making Ethically Difficult Decisions

Thu, 01/05/2023 - 6:34pm

Grey Zone Ethics: A Practitioners Guide to Making Ethically Difficult Decisions

A new book from Small Wars Journal contributor, Dan Pace.  It is a followup to his journal article "A House Divided: A Look at SOF Values"

The special operations community has an ethics problem. While forward, operators frequently encounter lose / lose situations that the community isn't preparing them to solve.  This increases the risk of mission failure and damage to the reputation of the SOCOM community as a whole.  In part, the problem stems from the difficulty of the situations themselves, but the problem is aggravated by the community's treatment of ethics training as an individual task, when it isn’t.  Ethics training is a collective task, and it requires as much training as any other special operations skill set.  Grey Zone Ethics provides an accessible and realistic solution to this problem.