Military Medical Ethics in Contemporary Armed Conflict

Michael L. Gross is Professor of Political Science at The University of Haifa, Israel, specializing in military ethics and military medical ethics and related questions of national security. His articles have appeared in numerous prominent journals, and his books include Ethics and Activism (Cambridge, 1997), Bioethics and Armed Conflict (MIT Press, 2006), Moral Dilemmas of Modern War (Cambridge, 2010); The Ethics of Insurgency (Cambridge, 2015) and two edited volumes, Military Medical Ethics for the 21st Century (Routledge, 2013) and Soft War (Cambridge, 2017). He is editor of the Routledge book series War, Conflict and Ethics and has led workshops on battlefield ethics, medicine, and national security for the Dutch Ministry of Defense, The US Army Medical Department, the Defence Medical Services (UK), The US Naval Academy, the Israel Defense Forces and the International Committee of Military Medicine.

Gross's book will undoubtedly serve as a mainstay among practitioners and theorists alike. Though it focuses almost exclusively on the United States and the United Kingdom in the Middle Eastern wars of the past two decades, much of the discussion applies to a host of other contexts as well. Though the book is capacious in its treatment of topics pertaining to military ethics, there is a univocal thesis animating the discussion at each turn: the idea that military medical ethics is not a disjunctive discipline with Janus-faced loyalties to medical ethics on the one hand and to military ethics on the other, but instead a sui generis discipline in its own right, which he painstakingly develops... Gross's book will, I believe, set the agenda among practitioners and theorists of medical ethics in war for years to come. It is a monumental achievement.

• IntroductionPart I: THEORY: Military Medical Ethics and Just WarChapter 1: The Principles of Military Medical Ethics Chapter 2: Patient Rights and Practitioner Duties Chapter 3: Moral Reasoning in Military Medical Ethics Part II: ON THE BATTLEFIELD: Caring for the Wounded of WarChapter 4: Military Medicine in Contemporary Armed Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan RevisitedChapter 5: Combat Casualty CareChapter 6: Detainees and Prisoners of WarChapter 7: Care and Compensation for Civilian Victims of War Part III: OFF THE BATTLEFIELD: Medicine as Weapon of WarChapter 8: Military Medical Research and ExperimentationChapter 9: Warfighter Enhancement: Research and TechnologyChapter 10: Medical Diplomacy and the Battle for Hearts and Minds Part IV: AFTERWAR: Post-War Justice and the Responsibility to RebuildChapter 11: Post-War Health Reconstruction Chapter 12: Veteran HealthcareConclusion: Military Medical Ethics and Just War: The 21st Century