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

by Daniel Pace, Anna Simons (Editor)

The special operations community has an ethics problem. While forward, operators frequently encounter lose / lose situations, and the community isn't preparing them properly to pick the best option. In part, the problem stems from the difficulty of the situations themselves, but it also stems from the community's treatment of ethics training as an individual task, when in reality it is not - it's a collective task, and it requires as much training as any other special operations skill set. This book presents a training plan to remedy that problem.

While the lessons and methodology presented are tailored to the special operations community and the problem it faces, they are applicable to many organizations that have to prepare their people to navigate ethically difficult terrain.

104 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 1, 2022

Reviews

[Eric Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

During my deployment to Afghanistan, a Ranger squad killed an old Afghan man because "He looked threatening", and his only sin was delivering chai to the ANA OP that was nearby. Such things are a problem with special forces as a whole, given their vagaries of combat and such, and produce stuff like the above. This book aims to address that in some way and offers a way to reduce the moral grayness of combat and the mental toll special forces endure to accomplish the mission. It's a start I think in the right direction, and Daniel offers some scenarios in order to set the tone and what to do in a murky situation, that were borne from real experiences. And if there was a fault, it's that this book is too short for the content that is probably sorely needed in the special operations community, even though I have never served in that capacity.