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American soldiers will soon receive new marching orders. Last week, the Pentagon released an “action plan” that, in the words of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, will help ensure that the protection of noncombatants in a conflict becomes “a strategic priority as well as a moral imperative.” 

In other words, as members of the world’s most powerful fighting force, U.S. military personnel on the front lines will be trained on how to better protect the most powerless people in a conflict: innocent civilians.

The moral part is this: The innocence of those not directly participating in a war is a value unto itself – one as important as military victory. The United States has learned the hard way, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, that it must respect a rising global norm for civilian protection in order to achieve its combat aims, such as winning support from people in a foreign land.

“Hard-earned tactical and operational successes may ultimately end in strategic failure if care is not taken to protect the civilian environment as much as the situation allows,” reads the Pentagon report, the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan.

Under the plan, the Pentagon will, for the first time, dedicate staff members – about 150 – toward preventing and reporting on both intentional and unintentional harm to civilians in conflicts. While the U.S. has taken such tragedies into account in the past, “it’s just trying to apply a consistent approach across the department so that this becomes a matter of how we do business,” a Pentagon spokesperson said.

At the soldier level, that means training to avoid what is called “confirmation bias,” or clinging to certain beliefs about a potential targeting situation or disregarding contradictory facts. Such bias was cited in a Pentagon investigation of a U.S. drone strike in Kabul last year that killed 10 Afghan civilians – three men and seven children. That mistake helped push Secretary Austin to order the new plan.

To protect noncombatants, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, armed forces must be encouraged “to internalize the values” of humanitarian law, such as the Geneva Conventions, that aim to limit the scope of war, especially the killing of civilians.

The key to improving such laws, writes scholar David Traven at California State University, Fullerton in a 2021 book, “lies in using our abilities for perspective-taking and empathy.” Such values must be practiced by “average citizens,” he adds, while governments should use war tactics that they “could rationally accept being used against their own civilian population.”

This golden rule approach to civilian protection is “relatively universal” across cultures and history, he writes. Respect for the moral autonomy and rights of civilians in conflict requires a military to ensure “a more equitable distribution of risks between their armed forces in the field (and in the air) and the civilian population.”

For soldiers, a reverence for innocent life during war takes practice. “We need to change how we think about the ethics of killing in war,” Dr. Traven concludes. And if the Pentagon fulfills the promise in its new plan, it will be thinking right along with him.