In this important and finely crafted book, Daniel Brunstetter notes that there is a difference between limited force and war, and that the ethics of the former are underdeveloped relative to the latter. This is a shame, because few states wish to take on the full risks and frightful costs of war, yet many still opt for using targeted tools of violence to forward their foreign policy objectives—whether to strike at terrorists, degrade enemy regimes, or punish war criminals. Brunstetter focuses on four kinds of limited force: drones, targeted airstrikes, no-fly zones, and small-scale interventions by special forces.
These phenomena cry out for moral and political evaluation. Brunstetter, in this refreshingly ambitious book, purports to offer a full-scale theory in this regard—of the “jus ad vim,” where vim stands for “force (short-of-war),” with the whole phrase thus meaning “the justice of using limited force.” This book represents the culmination of nearly a decade of thinking deeply about and contributing impressively to this vital topic.
The book kicks off with an engaging, illustrative quote from Julius Caesar, poised at the banks of the Rubicon, warning his troops that, should they cross it with him, full-on war would result. Although Caesar proceeded to do so, the domain of vim deals with force, so to speak, on the near side of that famous river. Importantly, Brunstetter acknowledges that he does not deal with all tools of vim; he neither discusses cyberconflict nor peacekeeping operations. Those perhaps get plenty of attention on their own, yet their absence does denote an incomplete theory. Maybe Brunstetter would say that they do not always involve physical, kinetic force—certainly the cyber case—and thus make an awkward fit with vim in any event. He is concerned with the deliberate use of political violence, usually killing force in some sense, and that which lies between everyday police action and full-scale war. That domain is large and murky, and he spends considerable time and care wrestling with its definitional and ontological complexities.
Brunstetter models both his title and, he says, his style, after Michael Walzer’s canonical Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (published in 1977 and currently in its fifth edition). Most readers will find Brunstetter much more self-consciously theoretical than Walzer, in the analytical style, and he prefers to focus only on a handful of contemporary cases, as opposed to the hundreds of historical references within Walzer. A strong case that Brunstetter keeps developing, which will edify most, is that of Mali’s and France’s repeated deployments of various vim tools: trying to keep the Islamist groups there under control while avoiding a large-scale, “boots on the ground” military intervention that might very well result in regime change, prolonged occupation, or both. Brunstetter has deep ties both with France and America and focuses on cases heavily involving them: the Global War on Terror (GWOT), Mali, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria. Syria provides a fitting illustration of vim: although the West has declined to intervene in that dreadful civil war with a warlike quantum of force and scope of objective, it has engaged in repeated, targeted missile and bombing attacks, especially in response to the Assad regime’s use of prohibited chemical weapons. The goal has been to punish that violation of the laws of war, to reincentivize Assad’s strategic decisions, and to degrade his regime’s military capability—but only in that chemical connection. The approach has been one of violent, warlike force, but not in warlike scale and with very limited objectives and only small-scale, truncated “wins.” Ironically, Brunstetter’s is an ambitious theory about unambitious uses of force.
As for the theory-building, although Brunstetter draws heavily on just war theory (JWT) for assistance, ultimately there needs to be differences, because “vim is different from bellum” (p. 255). This may cause confusion for some and raise this sharp question: “Well, doesn’t JWT already give us all the conceptual and normative tools we need, then, even in these short-of-war cases?” The weight of this query truly presses as one reads on, especially when one sees just how much Brunstetter does indeed draw on JWT. For example, in JWT, there are three categories of normative criteria deployed: jus ad bellum (to guide and judge the resort to war in the first place); jus in bello (to guide and judge actions within war); and jus post bellum (to guide and judge the termination of conflict and the transition back to peace). Brunstetter, when theorizing vim, likewise carves a distinction between the jus ad vim, the jus in vim, and the jus post vim. Some might wonder whether this offends against Occam’s Razor, multiplying entities beyond necessity (i.e., adding needless layers of complexity), yet Brunstetter ably defends himself by saying the new terms and categories are needed to think with greater precision and care about the ethics of using force-short-of-war. Plus, readers well versed in JWT will have no problem keeping things straight and admiring the added analysis of what can seem the same, yet actually be quite different, uses of force. In particular, those who use vim measures are trying to avoid escalation into war. It might be objected that even though that may be the intent, perhaps vim in fact will make war more likely. Indeed, isn’t crafting an ethics of vim actually authorizing—allowing for—more and more killing force? Brunstetter wrestles with this potent objection, ultimately hoping that his principles amount more to those of proper restraint and effective critical judgment, rather than easier, more permissive, legitimation of violence.
The remainder of the book then crafts these principles—most, but not all, drawn from JWT—to guide an ethical use of limited force. Familiar principles like just cause, right intention, proportionality, containment, last resort, deterrence, and noncombatant immunity thus make their appearance but are reinterpreted to fit the more targeted cases. Yet Brunstetter goes beyond JWT in his emphasis on norms of nonescalation in the vim case and the need for an even stricter noncombatant immunity than in bellum; in addition, he actually starts “backward” by saying that the jus post vim must dominate, in the sense that the overall goal of using vim ought to guide everything else in terms of when to start it and how to deploy it. JWT could perhaps profit from such a reordering. Brunstetter also notes how squeamish and precious JWT has become about proclaiming a resort to war as being punishment for something (like committing aggression), whereas he speaks frankly about vim tools being properly used as punishment all the time (note the Assad chemical weapons case or Osama bin Laden’s assassination). Finally, there are in fact several signs throughout the book that what emerges from Brunstetter’s scholarship may actually be something less like JWT and more of a kind of attenuated pacifism, wherein the use of vim tools might increasingly displace the resort to full-scale war altogether. If this does in fact unfold, such makes it all the more important to read Brunstetter’s excellent book and profit from its fine and principled analysis.
