Duty of Care

05:11 Sunday, 7 December 2025
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I have been criticizing the retired flag officer community in general, and retired ADM James Stavridis in particular, in comments on YouTube videos where he appears. Most recently, this one.

The reason for my criticism is because our country, that is to say, you and I, have a duty of care to ensure that the men and women who volunteer to serve us, our country, are not compelled to endure moral injury through the faithless exploitation of their service.

There's a lot to unpack here, it's important, and I don't happen to think that it should fall to me, a retired O-5 with only 22 years of active duty service to try and educate you about something you probably know nothing about. I never achieved high rank, I never commanded thousands of men and women, I never walked the halls of power where the decisions to deploy and exercise combat power, to "kill people and break things," as our juvenile SECDEF would say, are made.

That doesn't mean I don't know or understand the concept of "duty of care," it just means that I am perhaps not the most authoritative voice to write or speak on it.

Why should anyone listen to me? I never had stars on my shoulders.

But these flag officers are silent, and the duty of care we owe our armed forces is being ignored. This is a grievous failure, a profound breach of trust. It shames all of us.

And it's past time we began to talk about it.

Morality is a fraught concept. To the extent that it's discussed in the public sphere, it's used to divide us, rather than to find common ground in a search for "the good," in questions confronting our society.

"Moral injury," is a wound that a person suffers when they feel as though they have violated their own deeply held moral beliefs. This is part of the justification offered by intolerant people who don't wish to decorate cakes for gay wedding couples, and for health care workers who would rather withhold medical treatment from women than to offer care to women seeking to end a pregnancy.

That's quite a spectrum, from the trivial cake decorator to a doctor or a nurse confronting a patient seeking to terminate a pregnancy. It certainly extends farther than that, where you have members of the military being ordered to kill men in small boats, simply because they're carrying drugs.

Now, someone is going to get all upset about the use of the modifier "simply," there. It doesn't matter. Bear with me.

Presumably, in this country, there still remains a moral belief that it is wrong to kill. I say "presumably," because the NY Times recently interviewed some Trump voters, members of the "pro-life" party, and many of them seem pretty bloodthirsty to me. Here's a link that'll get you to the story, even if you're not a subscriber. It's not very long, but it's very troubling. Here's a taste:

“They should have done that strike regardless,” she said. “Every human being does have value, but if you’re caught up in something that’s very detrimental to society, I think that you should die.”

Let that one sink in for a while.

This is perhaps a result of the media diet they consume. In an opinion piece in the NY Times, which I strongly commend to your attention, Phil Klay writes:

The president’s supporters seem to grasp this. Fox News’s Jesse Watters responded with utter incredulity that the United States would offer quarter to an enemy. “We’re blowing up terrorists in the Caribbean,” he said on Monday, “but we’re supposed to rescue them from drowning if they survive?” Others went further. “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water,” Megyn Kelly, the conservative podcaster, said, “but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”

Seriously, read the whole thing, as we used to say back in the day.

I'm going to give you one more piece of homework, and ask you to read this piece by David French, which includes this paragraph:

Trump has put the military in an impossible situation. He’s making its most senior leaders complicit in his unlawful acts, and he’s burdening the consciences of soldiers who serve under his command. One of the great moral values of congressional declarations of war is that they provide soldiers with the assurance that the conflict has been debated and that their deployment is a matter of national will.

French alludes to moral injury when he writes of "burdening the consciences."

Moral injury is real, and it has genuine consequences.

People often regard military service as a duty, "a moral or legal obligation," to one's country. But that works both ways, and the reciprocal duty is seldom discussed apart from the seemingly ubiquitous notion that service members are owed gratitude.

"Thank you for your service."

We don't get off the hook that easy. We also have a duty of care, an obligation to uphold the trust placed in us when a person takes an oath of military service. Trust that their service will be used in honorable ways. Keeping faith with the values we supposedly share.

We have ignored our duty, and in so doing we are inflicting moral injury, wounds to the souls of our sons and daughters in uniform. We elected an immoral leader as president, appointed an incompetent person as Secretary of Defense, and surrendered the authority of the Congress to act as a check on the office of the president. We have abandoned our sons and daughters' souls to the greed and ambition of men not fit to polish their boots.

Shame on us.

And shame on the retired flag officers, who probably understand all of this as well as I do and probably better, for not speaking out. For not educating the public about our duty to safeguard the moral integrity of our soldiers and sailors.

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