Special operations remote advise and assist: an ethics assessment

Abstract

United States Army Special Forces who deployed to Iraq in mid-2014, and who were seeking to help Iraqi forces to combat Islamic State (ISIL) faced a considerable challenge: how could a force of fewer than 50 operators provide guidance and support to their Iraqi allies (mostly Iraqi Special Forces units who had been trained by U.S. forces prior to the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011) while also keeping in line with Washington’s policy of seeking to avoid any possibility of combat casualties among deployed U.S. Special Forces? Their solution to this dilemma came to be dubbed ‘Remote Advise and Assist’ (RAA). By cobbling together a system of voice and text communications, cameras, interactive maps and mobile handsets, these Special Forces personnel found they could ‘virtually accompany’ their Iraqi partners into hot zones where U.S. boots on the ground were forbidden. This approach seems to have been extremely successful, but potentially raises a range of ethical concerns. Against the backdrop of a general account of the ethics of employing surrogate forces, this paper explores the ethical questions raised by the practice of ‘Remote Advise and Assist’.