"The goal of military medicine is to conserve the fighting force necessary to prosecute just wars. Just wars are defensive or humanitarian. A defensive war protects one's people or nation. A humanitarian war rescues a foreign, persecuted people or nationfrom grave human rights abuse. To provide medical care during armed conflict, military medical ethics supplements civilian medical ethics with two principles: military-medical necessity and broad beneficence. Military-medical necessity designates the medical means required to pursue national self-defense or humanitarian intervention. While clinical-medical necessity directs care to satisfy urgent medical needs, military-medical necessity utilizes medical care to satisfy the just aims of war. Military medicine may therefore attend the lightly wounded before the critically wounded or use medical care to win hearts and minds. The underlying principle is broad, not narrow, beneficence. The latter addresses private interests, while broad beneficence responds to the collective welfare of the political community"--
Integrating the ethics of medicine and the ethics of war, Military Medical Ethics in Contemporary Armed Conflict offers theorists and practitioners, clinicians and commanders the tools they need to distribute scarce medical resources in wartime. Emphasizing that military medicine's goal is to maintain unit readiness and the force capabilities necessary to wage just war, Michael L. Gross instructs readers on when and how compatriot and host nation war fighters, local civilians, detainees, and veterans should receive medical attention. Readers will see how medicine functions also as a weapon of war. To this end, military forces deploy medical care to win local hearts and minds and harness medical science to enhance war fighter capabilities.
Beleaguered countries struggling against aggression or powerful nations defending others from brutal regimes mobilize medicine to wage just war. As states funnel medical resources to maintain unit readiness and conserve military capabilities, numerous ethical challenges foreign to peacetime medicine result. Force conservation drives combat hospitals to prioritize warfighter care over all others. Civilians find themselves bereft of medical attention; prison officials force feed hunger-striking detainees; policymakers manage healthcare to win the hearts and minds of local nationals; and scientists develop neuro-technologies or nanosurgery to create super soldiers. When the fighting ends, intractable moral dilemmas rebound. Post-war justice demands enormous investments of time, resources and personnel. But losing interest and no longer zealous, war-weary nations forget their duties to rebuild ravaged countries abroad and rehabilitate their war-torn veterans at home. Addressing these incendiary issues, Military Medical Ethics in Contemporary Armed Conflict integrates the ethics of medicine and the ethics of war. Medical ethics in times of war is not identical to medical ethics in times of peace, but a unique discipline. Without war, there is no military medicine, and without just war there is no military medical ethics. Military Medical Ethics in Contemporary Armed Conflict revises, defends, and rebuts wartime medical practices, just as it lays the moral foundation for casualty care in future conflicts.
