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Application of Artificial Intelligence in Military: From Projects View

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Professional ethics and social responsibility: military work and peacebuilding

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• Published: 16 August 2021
• Volume 37 , pages 1545–1561, ( 2022 )

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• M. A. Hersh 1  

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This paper investigates four questions related to ethical issues associated with the involvement of engineers and scientists in 'military work', including the influence of ethical values and beliefs, the role of gendered perspectives and moves beyond the purely technical. It fits strongly into a human (and planet)-centred systems perspective and extends my previous AI and Society papers on othering and narrative ethics, and ethics and social responsibility. It has two main contributions. The first involves an analysis of the literature through the application of different ethical theories and the application of gendered analysis to discussion of masculinities in engineering and the military. The second is a survey of scientists and engineers to investigate their opinions and experiences. The conclusions draw together the results of these two contributions to provide preliminary responses to the four questions and include a series of recommendations covering education and training, ethical approval of work not involving human participants or animals, the need for organisational support, approaches covering wider perspectives and the encouragement of individual ethical commitment.

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1 Introduction

1.1 military work.

This paper investigates four questions (see Sect. 1.3 ) associated with the involvement of engineers and scientists in 'military work'. This term is preferred to the more commonly used 'defence' work in recognition of the fact that in practice it is not purely related to defence. However, it should be noted that the choice of terminology is frequently determined by the values of the person using it, with supporters of military involvement of scientists and engineers more likely to use the term 'defence' and opponents 'military' work. These are crucial questions about the role of AI and other technologies and the type of society we want to use advanced technologies to create. This will be discussed in more detail when the questions are presented.

It is helpful to categorise military work, to clarify what we are discussing. Possible clarifications include both the type of work and the degree of military involvement (Hersh 2001 ; Roy 1989 ). Types of work include:

Fundamental basic/theoretical research which is not linked to particular applications (though they are not excluded).

Basic and applied research, with civilian and at most tenuous or distant military applications.

Work on devices which support weapons use, but are not themselves weapons.

Research on dual purpose military and civilian applications.

Basic and applied research on militarily relevant topics.

Research on defensive military hardware and software with no potential for killling.

Research on offensive weapons designed for killing people and destroying property.

Work for a firm with some military contracts.

Engineers and scientists who do military work may work at universities and technical schools that do military research (Hersh 2001 ) or be involved with military installations/bases and, suppliers including (Ullmann 1991 ):

Firms that sell some of their usual products to the military.

Specialised small and medium firms, for instance producing electronics and electromechanical components, that sell a significant proportion of their products to the military.

Large companies with both military and nonmilitary divisions.

Large military companies that almost exclusively produce military hardware, such as weapons, naval vessels and military aircraft.

1.2 National security: peacebuilding or weapons development

Unfortunately national security has tended to focus on military preparedness, including advanced weapons systems (Jackson 2011 ) rather than peacebuilding and resolving the problems that cause instability (Abbott et al. 2006 ). Engineers and scientists have been central to the development of weapons technologies which have transformed the nature of war. Despite the range of existing weapons from small arms to nuclear armed and powered submarines, scientists and engineers continue researching and developing new military systems. They also have significant involvement in the production and maintenance of existing weapons and military systems (Hersh 2015a ).

Global military spending remains high at about $1756 billion and an estimated 2.5% of global GDP in 2012 (Perlo-Freeman 2013 ; Perlo-Freeman et al. 2013 ) despite austerity measures in some countries. The number and scale of conflicts and the resulting deaths are slowly falling. However, there are now increasing numbers of protracted or recurring conflicts (Melvin 2012 ). The lack of success of nuclear and other weapons systems in keeping the peace and preventing human rights abuses is demonstrated by the 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations in 1945–2011 with an estimated 50–51 million violent deaths, including of civilians, in 1945–2000. National political decision-making, including genocide, starvation and deaths in prison camps and conflict, resulted in an estimated 214–226 million deaths in the twentieth century (Leitenberg 2001 ).

Understanding the causes of war and violent conflict can contribute to preventing them. One approach involves the author’s three-component model of the causes of violent conflict with the components: (i) an issue of dispute, (ii) a context which favours instability and discourages peaceful settlement and (iii) a trigger event or circumstance. This model and some of the main threats to global security are discussed in more detail in (Hersh 2013 ).

1.3 Research objectives

The paper aims to investigate the following questions:

The ethical issues associated with military work.

How ethical views and values influence professional engineering practice.

The extent to which awareness and practice of engineering ethics goes beyond professionalism and considers social, environmental and other impacts.

The influence of gendered perspectives on engineering.

It does this through its two main contributions. The first is a discussion of the issues related to military work using different analytical techniques (Sect. 2 ) and the application of gendered analysis to consideration of masculinities in engineering and the military (Sect. 3 ). The second is a survey of scientists and engineers to investigate their attitudes and experiences (Sects. 5 , 6 , 7 ). These two contributions are linked by a brief discussion of the actual and potential roles and responsibilities of engineers (Sect. 4 ). Conclusions drawing together the results of these two contributions to answer the research questions are presented in Sect. 8 and include recommendations (Sect. 8.1 ). The theoretical framework is different theories of ethics and the gendered and binary construction of engineering as a masculine domain focusing on the technical and professional and frequently excluding wider social, environmental and other considerations. This relates to work in AI and Society on gendered understandings of technology and its roles, e.g. (Barua and Barua 2012 ) and (Adam 1993 ).

This paper draws on and takes further my previous work in AI and Society on narrative ethics and othering (Hersh 2016 ) and values and social responsibility in science and technology (Hersh 2014 ). Different narratives are at the basis of the different constructions of the ethics of military work and are also an important theme in AI and Society, with recent examples including (Cunnean et al. 2019 ) and Adams ( 2019 ).

2 The ethics of preparation for war

2.1 just war theory, defence, aggression and arms sales.

Just war theory is still the most frequently used approach to discussing and justifying war (under limited circumstances), particularly in countries with a Christian ethos, such as those in Europe and the USA. Justification of a particular war requires both its cause and its conduct to be just (Norman 1995 ). Technological advances are changing the nature of warfare and blurring the distinction between combatants and non-combatants required by the just war ethic (Norman 1995 ). According to United Nations Foundation ( 2008 ) estimates, 90% of those killed, injured and displaced in violent conflict are (civilian) women and children. 'Non-combatants', including politicians and engineers who have researched, developed and/or manufactured military technologies, are playing an increasing role in conflict and the resulting devastation. 'Combatants' may be child soldiers, conscripts or those lured into the military by the prospect of education and training and an escape from poverty.

Biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, landmines and some other weapons are considered inherently immoral, making it impossible for them to be used ethically. Designers and manufacturers are considered to share the moral responsibility for the 'resulting atrocities' (Fichtelberg 2006 ). This is recognised by conventions outlawing chemical and biological weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force on 22 January 2021.

A country’s historical record can give an idea of the justice of the aims to be achieved through war and the feasibility of weapons development serving a benign or even morally good purpose (Lackey 1989 ). The recent records of the USA and Europe show fabricated claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and repeated bombing raids, including of Kosovo, Iraq and Syria, with largely economic and political motivation, but given humanitarian pretexts, indicating the unlikelihood of wars involving the USA and Europe being just.

Beliefs that scientific research for the military is a civic duty are based on just war theory and assumptions that governments are entitled to wage war if necessary to defend their citizens from aggression and that military research can reduce the destructiveness of war (Kemp 1994 ). However, 70–80% of all conflicts are now within not between states (sometimes with outside intervention) (Themnér and Wallenstein 2012 ), showing that the issue is very rarely defence against an outside aggressor. For instance, the UK remains committed to nuclear weapons and other high-tech weapons, despite its National Security Strategy stating that they are both not required and cannot deal with the actual national security risks (Bowen 2011 ).

The presence of advanced weapons systems may themselves pose a threat to those they are supposed to be protecting. For instance, convoys transporting nuclear weapons from Faslane to the maintenance plant in Burghfield two to eight times a year pass through or near several large cities. Collisions, break downs, and equipment failures have led to 180 safety incidents over the past 16 years, 43 in the last three years. The UK Ministry of Defence has admitted to eight accidents between 1960 and 1991 and that in extreme circumstances the involvement of nuclear warheads in a multiple pile-up could produce lethal levels of radiation. More than three quarters of a million people live within 10 kilometres of a potential convey accident on the M8 motorway in Glasgow and up to 265 schools, 59 railway stations and 19 hospitals could be affected (ICAN 2016 ). Local authorities are both unprepared to deal with convoy accidents and not informed of convoy travel through their areas.

Most countries with a well-developed military capacity engage in the arms trade and a sizeable percentage of military production is exported. The 100 largest arms producers and military services companies, excluding those in China, had total sales worth $410 billion in 2011 (Jackson 2013 ). There is limited regulation, due to the weakness of the Arms Trade Treaty, which came into force in 2014. Arms sales can support human rights abuses through direct use of the weapons and indicating international approval, thereby giving legitimacy and prestige (Williamson 1990 ) to governments which practice internal repression and torture. For instance, Syria modernised its forces prior to 2011 with imports of conventional weapons (Wezeman 2013 ).

Scientists and engineers considering military work should recognise that the ethical issues are not about military work to defend one’s country, but the production of weapons which will be traded, including to conflict zones and countries with poor human rights records and which may be used in internal repression and which divert resource from resolving real problems and meeting human developmental and other needs (Hersh 2015a ).

Thus, the justification of military work and the use of high-tech weapons involves the creation of narratives which prioritise the needs of some groups over others and the use of technology in ways which are not human-centred. Unpacking what is happening in this type of scenario resonates with many of the issues of concern to AI and Society about the role of technology and its uses and abuses.

2.2 Other ethical issues: the human, environmental and other costs of war

War involves loss of life, injury, damage to and destruction of the natural environment and damage to property. For instance, violent deaths in the war in Iraq have been variously estimated as between 151,000 and 655,000 between March 2003 and June 2006 and more than three million people have been displaced as refugees or internally since 2003 (Perlo Freeman and Solmirano 2012). Ongoing armed conflict in Africa has had a serious impact on development, estimated at €18 billion per year or 15% of GDP and €284 billion since 1990. This sum could have been used to solve the problems of HIV and AIDS in Africa, provide education, clean water and sanitation or prevent tuberculosis and malaria (Anon 2007 ). The production and export of arms can divert resources from solving the real international security threats of raw material scarcity, environmental degradation and unequal world resource distribution (Michalos 1989 ).

In considering the ethics of what they are doing, each arms exporting country and each engineer or scientist involved in military work should try to calculate the number of annual civilian deaths and injuries due to their weapons, as well as the illnesses that could have been prevented by spending the same amount on clean water, sanitation and other essential infrastructure rather than armaments (Bowen 2011 ).

Advanced military technologies, including drones and robots, may give an illusion of reducing the destructiveness of war, but may make longer wars politically acceptable. Killing and devastation at a distance facilitated by military technology is much easier physically and psychologically, as it removes the need to think about the humanity of the people being killed (Blue et al. 2013 ). A United Nations report considered that drones operated through computer screens have led to a 'playstation' attitude to killing (UN 2010 ). The development of 'soft kill' technologies has brought people involved in civil disobedience and non-combatants in war into the ‘killing zone’. It has been suggested that the increasing use of high-tech devices for killing at a distance has made engineers and engineering technicians the new 'frontline soldiers'(Blue et al. 2013 ).

US drone strikes which have killed or injured children have been defended as necessary to protect 'our' children with statements such as 'the bottom line is: in the end, whose four year old gets killed?' (Waheed 2012 ). Killing four-year-olds will almost certainly lead to very high levels of anger and resentment, which can fuel conflict. In addition, protecting values or civilisation (one of the justifications sometimes given for just war) by killing or injuring four-year-olds cannot be justified.

Many scientists and engineers still give insufficient consideration to the ethical impacts and wider consequences of their work. A 1980s quote that army scientists are 'dedicated to science, not politics' and have an attitude of "Just leave me to my work and I'll produce for you"' (Cole 1989 ) is unfortunately frequently still valid. The increasing potential and diversity of modern technology makes this even more worrying now than in the 1980s.

The significant military funding of universities, for instance in the UK, generally leads to reduced transparency (Hersh 2015a ). The large-scale involvement of the military in education encourages acceptance of military activity and the militarisation and commercialisation of education (Stavrianakis 2009 ) and raises questions about why there is insufficient public funding. A Loughborough engineering student donated a prize funded by BAE Systems to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, as 'university should be using its neutrality to promote ideals about the world we wish to live in. Researching clean energy, improvements in healthcare and communications for all. Not more effective ways of wiping bearded folk off the planet' (Taylor 2007 ).

2.3 Diversification/arms conversion: the Lucas Aerospace Corporate Plan

Planning for alternative employment options which maintain high-level skills is required to enable a reduction in military work without affecting jobs in areas dependent on military bases and firms. One of the best known examples is the 'corporate plan' developed by the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee (LACSSC) based on the 'right to work on socially useful products' (Steward 1979 ). LACSSC involved 13 white and blue colour trade unions and represented the whole workforce across the 17 Lucas Aerospace factories. Half the firm's work involved military production. The corporate plan was motivated by the need to fight for jobs in a climate of economic recession and aimed to proactively develop a strategy for anticipated future redundancies as part of a positive alternative plan for the company. It was influenced by the 1974 UK Labour Party industrial strategy on transitional policies to social ownership and control.

Plan development took about a year and involved questionnaires to each plant, as well as outside experts (Steward 1979 ). The two main aims were protecting members' 'right to work' and including products which were 'socially useful to the community at large'. Other aims were using labour intensive methods which required existing high-technology skills rather than automation. The plan involved about 150 new products, including a road-rail vehicle, artificial limb control systems, aids for blind people, alternative energy technologies and hybrid power packs (Salisbury xxxx). Important features of the approach were involvement and discussion by the whole workforce of their future and linking employment to social needs (Steward 1979 ).

Unfortunately, management refused to diversify from aerospace work and 5000 jobs were lost by 1977. Lucas Aerospace no longer exists as a company. However, many of the plan products, including power packs and wind turbines, are now mainstream, indicating that diversification could probably have saved Lucas. The plan received worldwide support and charitable funding enabled LACSSC to set up centres on alternative products at two polytechnics which helped other workers develop their own plans (Salisbury xxxx).

Investigation of the effectiveness of arms conversion programmes in preventing unemployment and moving to civilian uses indicates that important success factors include sufficient advance planning, adequate resources, strong political support at national and local levels (Unite 2016 ), and a central role for all the workers, particularly through the trade unions. Examples of successful and unsuccessful diversification activities can be found in (STUC 2015 ; Unite 2016 ) Overall success has been greater in the USA than Europe, partly due to the Base Realignment and Closure Act 1988, which requires five years advance warning of any closures and Federal government action to ensure early measures to maintain employment, and its implementation through the Office of Economic Alignment (STUC 2015 ; Unite 2016 ). Combination of the basic principles of the Lucas Plan with identified success factors and useful measures (STUC 2015 ; Unite 2016 ) is likely to have positive impacts.

Space constraints have prevented in depth discussion of the Lucas Plan. However, it is an excellent example of human-centred design and applications which take account of real needs. This again echoes an important them in AI and Society, paralleling for instance (Brandt and Cernetic 1998 ; Rauner et al. 1988 )

3 Social construction: engineering, masculinity and militarism

3.1 binary social constructions.

Engineering and the military have both been socially constructed in ways that are based on particular socially constructed views of masculinity. This leads to the exclusion or discomfort of many women. Application of gender analysis is helpful in unpacking and increasing understanding of both engineering and the military and the links between them. It is also useful in avoiding assumptions of male normativity and helping to provide wider perspectives on the actual and potential roles of engineers.

The term engineer was initially used for the military troops who built and operated military machinery (Tonso 1996 ). This is one of the factors that has led to a pervasive dominant masculinity in engineering with the typical engineer perceived as male (Wajcman 2000 ). It has been suggested that the gendered assumptions of military institutions have provided models for engineering and engineering education. In particular, engineering curricula are considered to combine 'technical training with cultural socialization that fuses hierarchy, discipline, loyalty and self-control' (Hacker 1989 ), with the later characteristics typical of the military. The construction of gender and sexuality affects work choices and experiences, with 'male work' such as engineering linked to male power and consequently higher status and better paid than women's work (Henwood 1998 ). Images of engineering as a masculine profession which is both tough, heavy and dirty (though inaccurate) and high-tech, corporate and for-profit play into gender stereotypes and the perception of being unsuitable for women (Pawley 2012 ; Powell et al. 2009 ).

While discussing the 'masculinisation' of engineering, it is important to recognise that the acting out of masculinity is affected by culture and has changed over time. Thus, there are both common factors and very significant differences in the understanding and embodiment of masculinity in different cultures. This makes it more appropriate to talk of masculinities than masculinity (Hearn 1996 ).

Engineering frequently has a binary perspective, including people or technology focussed, social or technical and detached objectivity or emotional connectedness. These duals have strong gender associations, with technology focus, technical and detached objectivity considered male and people focus, social and emotional connectedness female. Engineers are assumed to be responsible for any deficiencies in their technical work, but not for the outcomes of this work (Blue et al. 2013 ) and its social and environmental impacts. This 'masculinist' ideology based on the construction and assumed superiority of masculine characteristics (Blue et al. 2013 ) has also contributed to engineering gatekeeping and the exclusion of minority groups and individuals (Seymour and Hewitt 1997 ).

3.2 Women engineers in the workplace

There has been a tendency to construct and position women engineers as different from both men and other women. Differences from other women include being 'exceptional', strong, determined, 'high flyers', who, unlike other women, are not discouraged (Henwood 1998 ) by all the difficulties of being a woman engineer in a male environment. The construction of women in engineering as 'exceptional' implies that engineering is 'men's work' for which most women are unsuited, and is therefore a barrier to their participation. It also does not allow women engineers to be average or fail and has contributed to the limited approaches and unsuccessful outcomes of equal opportunity policies (Henwood 1998 ).

Most studies agree that women engineers position themselves as career-oriented, qualified professionals, who are intellectually engaged, confident and passionate about their work (Bastalich et al. 2007 ; Jorgenson 2002 ) and, if they have children, good mothers worried about conflicts between work and family. It is unlikely that research on male engineers would have investigated or identified concerns about their role as fathers. Women engineers also want to be considered as individuals rather than a homogenous group (Jorgenson 2002 ).

Women engineers have taken two main approaches to their minority status in a profession constructed as male: (i) being 'just as good' as men, (ii) emphasising differences and the impacts of engineering work cultures (Bastalich et al. 2007 ). The first group associated success with competence, masculinity and rationality and femininity with emotionality and considered engineering suited to independent self-confident people. They rejected gender inequality, were unaware of sexism and gender discrimination and considered that men and women had equal opportunities (Cockburn 1985 ; Faulkner 2000 ; Morgan 2000 ). They had no problems with male dominated workplace cultures and actively fit in to show they did not require special treatment (Bastalich et al. 2007 ; Jorgenson 2002 ; Powell et al. 2009 ). However, this may have been a means of positioning themselves as qualified engineers and part of an acceptance strategy in a context favouring male interests and perspectives (Jorgenson 2002 ).

The second group focused on the different qualities they could bring as women rather than proving themselves in male terms and had became engineers as a result of their maths and science ability and interest in engineering. They experienced difficulties with engineering culture and missed the presence of other women, leading to them leaving or considering leaving the profession. However, both sameness and difference narratives detract attention from women engineers’ generally agreed competence (Bastalich et al. 2007 ) and draw attention to their minority and contested status.

This discussion of women and how they position themselves in engineering parallels that in AI and Society on the gendering of computing and computers (Barua and Barua 2012 ; Mackinnon et al. 1993 ). The continuation of this scheme in the discussion of gender and engineering cultures in the following section again parallels discussion in AI and society on the gendering of computing culture and (Truckenbrod 1993 ) and the gendering of technology (Adams 2019 ).

3.3 Engineering culture and masculinity

'Tinkering' with components and machines frequently given a female persona has been found to be an important part of engineering culture (McIlwee and Robinso 1992 ). It has contributed to the development of a symbolic relationship between masculinity and technology which continues to have a significant role in the exclusion of women from science and engineering (Holth and Mellström 2011 ). Men use interactions and relationships with machines to create gendered spaces in various cultures, including Sweden and Malaysia. Women are both excluded and transformed into machines given characteristics men would like in a partner (Mellström 2004 ) and with which they have heterosexual 'technoerotic' and platonic relationships. Thus 'tinkering' with 'female' machines has a major role in the lives of male engineers and acts to reproduce normative heterosexuality and gendered differences (Holth and Mellström 2011 ).

The 'tinkering' culture remains largely male only and is partly responsible for continuing assumptions that mechanical abilities are second nature to men, but not women. The passing on of gendered knowledge, a close paternal relationship and learning about technology from their fathers are important for many male engineers. This lack of experience has been found to negatively affect the career prospects of women who had not 'grown up tinkering' and did not share the 'obsession' unless active measures were taken to change this (McIlwee and Robinson 1992 ). However, knowledge about technology, though not necessarily the 'tinkering' culture, is sometimes now also passed on to daughters (Holth and Mellström 2011 ), including by the increasing, but small proportion of women engineers.

Engineering workplace cultures are still based on narrow masculine norms and intolerant of diversity (Bastalich et al. 2007 ). There are frequently pressures to confirm, organisationally powerful male networks, the generic use of 'he', heteronomative and sexualised culture and conversation dominated by male interests and sometimes a lack of sanctions against offensive ‘humour’ (Faulkner 2009 ; Holth and Mellström 2011 ). Many women experience difficulties with this masculine culture (Evetts 1998 ; Skaggs 2013 ) and the values, systems and performance criteria established by men for men (Powell et al. 2009 ). The likelihood of discomfort may lead them to decide against science, engineering and technology careers (Glover et al. 1996 ) or change career after graduation (Skaggs 2013 ).

The adaptation of engineering culture by women engineers may require an impossible and unhealthy balancing act. They need to construct and manage an appropriate gender identity, possibly by distancing themselves from other women, accepting traditional stereotypes and male culture and ignoring sexist behaviour by defining it as exceptional (Dryburgh 1999 ; Jorgenson 2002 ). Women engineering students have been found to frequently question why they continue to be integrated academically, but not into engineering networks (Skaggs 2013 ). Both women and men have work focused, positive and respectful engineering workplace interactions. However, male–female interactions tend to be more formal and lack the banter and familiarity found between men (Holth and Mellström 2011 ).

3.4 Masculinity in the military and engineering

Militaries have also been recognised as playing an important role in shaping masculinity in broader society (Barrett 1996 ; Woodward 2000 ). Despite increasing numbers of women, the overwhelming majority of the 20 million military globally are male (Connell 2000 ). Military training leads to male socialisation into a violent concept of masculinity (Cock 1992 ) with combat its ultimate test (Cock 1992 ). Women have generally been excluded from combat (Carreira 2006 ; Heinecken 2000 ) due to their perceived lack of strength (Heinecken 2000 ) and perceived responsibility for children, whereas men's perceived roles include defending the country, women and children (Mankayi 2006 ).

Military culture, socialisation and identity involve a particular type of hegemonic masculinity (Barrett 1996 ) which, by definition, excludes women. Aggression, violence and macho behaviours are combined with a caring supportive masculinity required for camaraderie and the effective teamwork necessary for a functioning 'killing machine' (Green et al. 2010 ). The male, strongly heterosexual warrior hero is still the key representative of military masculinity and used in the construction of national security (Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport 2003 ; Woodward 2000 ). However, 'heroic' risky behaviour which endangers the team is disapproved of (Green et al. 2010 ).

Successful soldiers are 'one of the boys' and engage in banter to become part of the in-group (Green et al. 2010 ). Humour and banter have been found to be important in constructing and consolidating gendered identities (Kehily and Nayak 1997 ). However, this type of masculine in-group is even more difficult for women to break into and become accepted by than engineering networks. Women are likely to lack the close 'buddies' who are important for survival, particularly in combat, and this is probably one of the factors that permits high levels of sexual harassment, lack of respect and actual violence against women in the military.

Women's presence in the military leads to paradigm discomfort and rejection due to the contradiction between 'defending' the country and traditional discourses of women needing to be protected (Mankayi 2006 ). Agency by women, including active sexuality, challenges double standards and constructions of military masculinity based on domination. The most horrifying example of this is the use of rape as a weapon of war and 'reward' to male soldiers, which may be encouraged by some male leaders as part of military socialisation e.g. (Neill 2000 ). Rape was finally recognised as a war crime in 2000 (Neill 2000 ). Women military are also at risk of sexual harassment and rape and sometimes even murder by their male colleagues and conspiracies of silence by their superiors (Enloe 2004 ). Sexual harassment is prevalent and a lack of respect for women's authority, rank and commands even more so (Heinecken 2000 ; Sedibe 2000 ).

Thus, the links between the gendering of engineering and the military contribute to linking the two and restricting engineering practice. In particular, this leads to a limited focus which ignores wider issues related to caring and the needs of minority groups and the environment.

There is increasing, but still limited, awareness of wider gender possibilities and rejection of binary gender. Feminists and queer theorists are challenging gender dualisms (Lorber 2000 ) as hierarchical and resulting in gender inequalities and stereotypes to which real people do not conform. Gender binaries may lead to binaries in other areas, particularly those that are strongly gendered, such as science and engineering (Faulkner 2000 ). Binary opposition also limits possibilities by structuring the world as mutually exclusive opposites (Massey 1995 ). Moves beyond binary gender could lead to a welcome deconstruction and reconstruction of engineering.

4 The role and responsibility of engineers

Engineers and engineering have a very significant impact on society. The quote at the end of the Sect. 2 highlights the issues of the purpose of engineering and the vision of future society engineers should be trying to construct. Sects. 2 and 3 have discussed the involvement of engineers in the military and the masculinisation of the profession which leads to a focus on the technical at the expense of wider considerations of the environmental, social and other impacts of engineering.

However, the construction of engineering is changing. There is increasing understanding of the need to consider uncertainties in both the problem and potential solutions rather than assuming the appropriateness of current technologies for solving significant challenges (Nieusma and Tang 2012 ). There is increasing integration of the social and technical and attention to social justice concerns in engineering education, at least partly in response to accreditation requirements (Nieusma 2013 ). This gives exciting and creative possibilities for projects for implementing social justice which take account of the wider context (Nieusma and Tan 2012 ), consider local requirements and fully involve local end-users. More than a century ago Tesla ( 1905 ) proposed the use of technologies for transmitting information and electrical energy as a means of furthering peace in the world. However, the potential of technology in this area has not yet been achieved. This transformation needs to encompass a greater diversity of engineers, as well as applications that contribute to peacebuilding.

However, current values of material advances for human benefit and the lack of consideration of who will benefit have resulted in a tacit assumption of engineering design for (non-disabled) white men (Downey 2012 ) by middle class (non-disabled, white) men (Oldenziel 1999 ). This has also led to the normalisation of a particular type of engineering which does not challenge dominant values, supports the industrial-military complex and can exacerbate social injustice, particularly in developmental contexts (Downey 2012 ). There are also examples of participatory approaches to engineering projects to meet real needs. For instance, the Program of Rehabilitation Organised by Disabled Youth of Western Mexico (PROJIMO) is organised and run by disabled young people and takes a participatory approach to design and involves users as co-designers of assistive technologies, which are tailored to their cultural and physical context (Werner and PROJIMO 1998 ). Members also work to prevent violence, challenge social attitudes to disability and create jobs for disabled youth.

These issues are investigated and considered further through a survey of engineers, their attitudes, experiences and education and training, which is presented in Sects. 5 , 6 and 7 .

5 Methodology

A five-section questionnaire was used to investigate the experiences and attitudes of scientists and engineers. Section A covered career based information, such as type of employer, whether working, studying or unemployed, and years of experience, to try to ensure a diverse sample and enable statistical correlation to be carried out (if sufficient results were obtained). Section B investigated participants' views on ethical issues, including the ethical factors considered in different types of decision-making, whether certain types of activities should require ethical approval and the most important ethical issues in professional and personal contexts, as well as changes over time. Section C considered ethical issues in employment, including participants’ views on employment involving certain types of weapons systems and types of employment they would like and avoid on ethical grounds, as well as changes over time, and experiences of ethical dilemmas in their careers. Section D investigated participants’ education and training in ethical issues, both as part of their original qualification and in subsequent employment. The final section provided opportunities for further comments and suggestions. The questionnaire obtained a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data, often in the form of multiple choice or rating questions followed by opportunities to comment on and explain the answers.

Ethical approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee of the College of Science and Engineering of the University of Glasgow. The questionnaire was available for anonymous completion online or as a WORD file. Information about the questionnaire was circulated to the engineering or engineering and science departments, schools, colleges or faculties of many UK universities with a request to send it to all their staff. It was also posted to email lists and sent to my contacts and publicised using social media.

6.1 Participant overview

Only 15 responses were received despite fairly wide circulation and it is recognised that these respondents may not represent the whole engineering and scientific communities. Although a much larger number of fully representative responses would have been desirable, it is legitimate to analyse the opinions and experiences of a small group in a larger population, particularly when there is little research on the topic and group (as is the case here). However, it is important to avoid inaccurate claims of representativeness.

Two-thirds worked at universities and 13% in industry. The others worked as an author and independent consultant, both in industry and universities and in honorary positions. Just over half (53%) were employed and a third retired. The areas worked in were very diverse and included computer science, environmental communication, chromatography, fuel poverty, human genetics, aerospace and science-religion dialogue. The overwhelming majority (87%) were male, as is typical of the sector, with no non-binary representation. 60% were from different countries in Europe (France, Ireland, Poland, Romania, Scotland, UK), with individuals from Canada, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and multiple countries. Participants were mainly very experienced, with two-thirds having worked more than 21 years, 27% 11–20 years and 7% two to five years. Most of them worked in large organisations, with 40% in organisations having 201–1000 workers and 40% in organisations with more than 1000 workers.

6.2 Views on ethical issues

Participants considered ethical factors to be important in decision-making on choice of career and decisions about whether to participate in particular activities, with average scores ranging from 4.1 for decisions on participation in a particular project to 4.6 for choice of career. Their views were also fairly stable over time, with 80% considering they would have given the same responses five years ago and 73% 10 years ago (with 7% too young then), and two-thirds giving the same responses 20 years ago and one third unsure.

Currently, in most organisations, an ethical approval process is only required for projects involving human participants and animals. Participants were generally strongly in favour of the need for ethical approval being extended to projects involving the development of (i) technologies or materials intended or likely to be used as weapons, (ii) the development of toxic chemical or biological materials, (iii) the development or use of materials likely to have a negative effect on human health or the environment and (iv) developments likely to have a negative effect on human society. In each case, two-thirds of participants very definitely supported this extension, 7–13% supported it and 7–20% possibly supported it. However, the issue of ethical review of research not involving human participants or animals and the extension of ethical approval to these areas seems not to have been considered previously in the literature.

Reasons for their views included recognition that 'most work does impact upon society and the planet at large'; the need that 'innovations are subjected to agreed ethical performance and not accepted ... purely on the basis of technical contribution' due to 'the speed variability and complexity of technological innovations and their impact on human dimensions and the animal kingdom'; the need for ethical review of projects 'which can influence any aspect of life'; and the need to 'protect the human and environment' in the case of projects that 'can give harm to human and environment'. These views illustrate participants moving beyond the binary divide and taking responsibility for the outcomes of their work (Blue et al. 2013 ). However, caution was expressed in terms of the ability of university ethics committees to make good decisions in line with criticisms in the literature (Dyck and Allen 2013 ) and a suggestion that 'ethics ... is sometimes taken too far'. There was also recognition that the applications of research were not always clear and that 'tech might seem mundane but could be used in weapons'.

6.3 Ethical issues in employment

Participants provided a variety of ethical factors that affected important decisions, though one participant did not respond due to lack of 'understand[ing] of what 'ethics' actually means in my professional capacity'. Personal and scientific integrity was considered important in all the proposed situations in line with the literature (Loui 2005 ). In the case of job choice, participants were additionally concerned about the ethics and culture of the employing organisation, avoiding harm in line with the principle of non-maleficience (Hersh 2015b ), e.g. warfare, and particular issues related to the use of genetic and personal data, climate change, poverty and rights. Thus, participants were concerned about the real threats to global security, including growing militarism, climate change and global poverty (Abbott et al. 2006 ; ORG 2006 ). In the case of choices to work on a particular project, the ethical issues considered included the need for the project, its funding source, public safety, intellectual property and ethical conflicts with the project values. Ethical factors which affected decisions to provide advice or consultancy included the ability to provide the service, confidentiality, privacy, avoiding conflicts of interest, the funding source and the need for the advice or consultancy. Ethical factors which would affect day-to-day professional decision-making included work ethics, professionalism, well being, avoiding harm, public safety, group development, mutual support, honesty and freedom to exercise judgement. Thus, both day-to-day decision-making and choices to work on a particular project combined considerations of professionalism with wider concerns, thereby countering the binary divide and integrating technical/professional and social justice concerns (Nieusma 2013 ). Wider issues of the need for the project and its values were considered in the case of choices to work on a particular project, but less relevant in day-to-day decisions.

Participants' reasons for their ethical stances on these issues were based on personal ethical statements in several cases. They included coming from 'a faith tradition which helps me make sense of ethics at a personal and institutional level'; choosing 'not to take projects and jobs based on their connection to military application'; 'personal integrity is very important'; and 'I would not be comfortable using genetic data to inform insurance policies for example'.

A range of ethical issues were presented as being important in a professional context, with honesty the most frequently cited and one participant considering the area 'complicated'. The importance of honesty parallels the literature on honesty and integrity being given the same importance by engineering students as technical competence (Loui 2005 ). Other important ethical issues covered professional, relationship and wider issues, though some issues fit into more than one of these categories. Professional issues included intellectual property rights, sharing scientific information and research ideas, non-disclosure agreements, dynamic responsibility and returning results to patients. Relationship issues included fair treatment of staff and avoiding ethical conflicts with employers. Wider issues included the bias from only sharing positive analysis and results, funding allocations, benefits to participants not just the academic, and (gender and race) equality and diversity. Thus, their concerns could again be divided into professional ethics and wider ethical issues relating to opening up engineering beyond middle class (non-disabled, white) men (Oldenziel 1999 ).

Honesty was again the most frequently cited important ethical issue in a personal context, followed by integrity. Other issues covered relationships and personal ethics. Relationship issues included avoiding conflicts, care and emotional support for colleagues and mutual respect and recognition. Issues of this type are in line with the ethics of care (Gilligan 1982 ). Issues related to personal ethics included sharing information about financial and socioeconomic status, personal conduct, deciding whether to stay in research or move into industry, balancing personal standards, the public's need to know and commercial secrecy, and faith motivated ethics.

87% of participants responded to a number of open-ended questions on their attitudes to particular types of military employment (see Table 1 ). Two participants, a university assistant professor and a retired information systems manager, both from outside Europe, did not respond to any of these questions.

One participant was willing to participate in all types of military research and development and maintenance as long as this was 'in agreement with the ethical policy' in line with rule based approaches to ethics (Hersh 2015b ) without stating which ethical policy or how they would evaluate its adequacy. Another (reported in the 'other' category) indicated tradeoffs between, for instance, money and responsibility and high expertise and (selective) scholarship, without indicating the choices they would make. Comments indicating opposition to particular types of military work included 'These technologies should be abolished. Encourage anyone considering such a career to do something useful with their lives.'; 'These are instruments of unnecessary killing.' This links to and goes beyond just war rejection as inherently immoral, of indiscriminate and 'cruel' weapons, such as nuclear weapons and landmines (Fichtelberg 2006 ). Other concerns about military work included 'I have a real problem with the levels of surveillance and I am totally against this aspect of our society'; and 'The development of any military hardware or technology has to be put into the context of escalating the arms race ... All of these technologies are developed at the expense of more socially beneficial expenditures. This is in line with the literature on diversion of resources by military work from solving real problems (Anon 2007 ; Michalos 1989 ). The military industrial complex is a real problem both in terms of the threats of increased conflict, and the loss of opportunities to use the human and financial resources for socially progressive purposes'. One participant referred to the temptations (of surveillance work) as the 'shiny cup syndrome' with scientists 'preoccupied with the technical challenges'. This is in line with the literature on the binary focus on technical work, but not its outcomes (Blue et al. 2013 ).

Comments supporting (very) restricted work in these areas include 'As one of the worst wars is going in Syria, I would feel this is unethical but the RND is needed so that engineers and scientists are aware the harmful part of these weapons and eventually propose something to the United nations about these weapons.'; 'Every country has its own right to protect its country so there have to be RND for every aspect of military. Without RND, one country can damage the environment and human in worst ways.' This seems to be in accordance with just war theory (Norman 1995 ). Other comments supportive of limited military work included 'R&D into making small arms easier to conceal and more lethal ... will only increase the risk of intentional and unintentional misuse. R&D into features that will make small arms safer ... should be encouraged.' Though initially the participant seemed aware of the wider implications of small arms development, the comment about safety possibly indicates a separation and focus on technical rather than social, environmental and other wider concerns (Blue et al. 2003 ). Another participant is aware of the wider issues (Nieusma and Tang 2012 ), but still possibly trying to find some areas in which they can work. 'R&D Employment is this area remains for the most part ethically challenging .. There are few socially beneficial areas of R&D here.'

Two-thirds of participants would have given the same replies 10 years ago and 47% 20 years ago. Reasons for the changes included the increasing importance of cyber technologies, rejection of nuclear power and now believing 'we can move forward with renewable and safer energy sources', 'age and cumulative experience' and changes in worldview with recognition that 'all the western countries have the financial power in developing weapons (through technology) and destroying human lives for the sake of economy and power gain'. To some extent, this change in perspective shows increasing awareness of the underlying causes of conflict (Abbott et al. 2006 ) and the consequent need to avoid activities which contribute to them.

Ethical issues had affected the career choices of the overwhelming majority of participants (87%). Particular concerns related to doing work that was (socially) useful, avoiding involvement with 'harmful technology ' and trying to 'benefit humanity and the planet, not destroy it' in line with the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence (Hersh 2015b ). One participant considered that university work had fewer ethical issues than industry or government. Two participants explicitly avoided and declined military work and, in one case, changed jobs as a result. One participant worked for the 'defence industry' and another was (initially) a 'military engineer' and 'was confronted with ethical issues affecting my choice of career'. 80% of participants would avoid particular types of employment and two-thirds had preferred types of employment on ethical grounds. The types of employment most frequently avoided included military or weapons work, but also covered genetic data in insurance, fossil fuels, nuclear power, government, US companies and 'areas that did not align closely with my values'. This illustrates participants challenging the normalisation of engineering which supports dominant values and the industrial–military complex (Downey 2012 ) However, in the case of having to make choices about providing for their family or avoiding choices counter to their values, this respondent would choose their family. General comments on preferred areas of employment included 'avoiding harm' and 'using technology beneficial to well being'. The most frequently cited specific area was education/academia/university. Other specific areas included NGOs and pastoral care, health care, food, environmental sciences, pharmaceuticals, renewable energy and sustainable agriculture and regulation of firms.

The overwhelming majority of participants (93%) had experienced ethical dilemmas. A third of the participants experienced such dilemmas a few times a year, 7% once a year and the others had experienced them once or a few times. The frequency of dilemmas indicates the importance of both engineering ethics education and support. (See Sect. 6.4 for discussion of ethics education.) Dilemmas covered a wide range of issues. They included refusing jobs involving ethical compromises or which were professionally too challenging. In one case involving nuclear power, the participant was threatened with dismissal. One participant faced dilemmas about accepting corporate funding each year and resolved them using corporate social investment to 'do beneficial work'. Other dilemmas related to bad practice and possible illegality. One case involved an investigation into possible contamination of a pharmaceutical product with a small risk to consumers being ended while the participant was on holiday, probably without further action, and their lab books being 'misplaced'. Another involved a principal researcher misappropriating co-workers' ideas and 'greenwashing' a power plant. In the last two cases, the participant left the organisations (soon afterwards), in the power plant case to allow them to expose their former employer's bad practice. Another respondent set up and promoted a social mentoring programme to overcome institutional barriers to the employment, retention and development of colleagues from minority and disadvantaged groups, thereby working to reverse the exclusion of minority groups and individuals (Seymour and Hewitt 1997 ).

6.4 Education and training on ethical issues

The university or vocational course of just over half the participants (53%) involved education and/or training in ethical issues, that of a third did not and 7% were unsure. There were a number of different modes of delivery, with a combination of separate course modules and integration into other teaching the most common. Other options included a separate course module, integration into other course modules and occasional workshops. The amount of time involved varied greatly from half or one day to 5 or 10%. There did not seem to be any standardisation in the topics covered. Some courses or training covered issues such as data protection, equality, obtaining ethical approval and ethics for engineers. Others were more specific and covered human-centred design, technology and society, medical ethics, including patient communications, confidentiality of patient records and ethical issues in developing health IT systems and use of animals in science. The overwhelming majority (88%) of those with ethics education considered it useful. Positive further comments included ethics making 'students and researchers reflect not just on their lives, but also on their role and contributions to society, beyond the straitjacket of institutional structures and regulations' and 'teaching medical students how to protect patient information. We also teach designer and developer of health IT system to be aware of ethical issues during RND stage.' These comments parallel the literature on the increasing importance of integrating the social and technical and the importance of social justice in engineering education (Nieusma 2013 ) and engineering ethics involving ‘social and global stewardship’ (Loui 2005 ). Critical comments included education being 'procedural [rather] than stimulating engagement' and having worked in an unethical political regime which lacked interest in education and training on ethical issues. The first comment parallels concerns in the literature that engineering ethics education is superficial (Newberry 2004 ).

A third of participants had participated in subsequent education or training on ethical issues and 40% had not, with the remainder not responding. For those who had, this was a matter of choice rather than an employer requirement, though in one case it was also required for professional registration. The amount of time involved again varied greatly from half a day to 10%, with one participant taking a presumably part-time university accredited course over three years to support free time work as a lay minister. Everyone who had participated considered this training useful. It helped participants 'understand what my design work was for'; 'help[ed] students and researchers engage in study and research into societal issues'; and 'Employment and regulatory integrity [are] ... critical in the pharmaceutical industry and are aligned for the most part with my personal values'. While the majority of respondents who had ethics education found it useful, it was not always sufficient in quality, quantity and range of coverage.

6.5 Further comments and suggestions

Participants noted the limited ethical training available and the importance of understanding ethical issues related to their work. They also referred to various potential conflicts, including between 'human centred values or technological commitment' and professional codes of ethics and commercial interests and 'scholarly/university values and neo-liberal values' and the shift in research towards commercialisation with the need for 'protection for scientists and engineers who put ethics before profit'. These comments parallel the literature on the binary divide in engineering with a focus on the technical and frequently a disconnect from the social and wider applications of their work (Faulkner 2000 ). However, they do not raise the gendered elements of this divide considered in the literature (Holth and Mellström 2011 ). Suggestions for improving ethical behaviour in professional practice by scientists and engineers included increasing opportunities for training and discussion, the production of professional ethics guides and standards and the development of regulatory protection for ethical behaviour. Suggestions also covered individuals publishing on ethical aspects of their professional work, joining communities of like-minded professionals and active 'engagement in the selection, design, and implementation of technology for socially useful purposes', parallelling the literature on socially useful applications of engineering, e.g. (Werner and PROJIMO 1998 ).

7 Discussion of results

Despite the low response rate, the sample is reasonably diverse and covers a number of different countries, a wide range of disciplines, several different career stages (with a bias towards greater experience), types and sizes of organisations (with particular representation of larger organisations and universities). The male gender bias is unfortunately typical of the population. While possibly not fully representative, the results give voice to the experiences, concerns and difficulties of a group of scientists and engineers and highlight some of the issues they face.

Ethical approval in most countries is only required for projects that involve people or animals. The strong support from participants for extending this to weapons, toxic materials and developments likely to have a negative effect on human health or society, or the environment indicates the timeliness of revisiting this issue. As indicated by the cautionary comments (though in principle I consider it difficult to take ethics ‘too far’) on the ability of ethics committees to take good decisions and the difficulties in identifying potential applications, the details would need to be considered carefully and regulations and guidelines drawn up. Participants' comments indicate the desirability of evaluating the ethics of the outcomes and not just of the practices involved. This would convey an important message about ethics not just affecting projects involving people or animals and involving outcomes as well as processes. This would require value judgements, involving both personal beliefs and any available guidance. However, professionals frequently make value judgements with an element of subjectivity, for instance when evaluating research grants. Institutions with large military or other controversial grants are likely to be, at least initially, opposed due to the likely impacts on their funding. However, a change in research funding allocation and priorities could have a valuable effect on encouraging ethical socially useful research.

There were both differences and similarities in the ethical issues considered important in the professional and personal contexts and in these contexts and specific types of ethical decision-making. Overall, participants were concerned about honesty, integrity, transparency and relationships and caring for others in line with the literature e.g. (Loui 2005 ) and the ethics of care (Gilligan 1982 ). The overwhelming majority of participants had experienced ethical dilemmas, some of them fairly frequently. Some participants had taken a stand with possible personal risks in refusing jobs involving ethical compromises or where they felt unqualified.

Participants were not particularly positive about engaging in different types of military work. Surprisingly they showed greater refusal to participate in maintenance than research and development of various military related systems. This seems counter-intuitive and would require further investigation. Possible explanations are beliefs about the greater impact of maintaining existing systems than research and development, which may not be implemented, and greater interest in research and development than maintenance work. The greatest negativity was expressed about cluster bombs and landmines, followed by nuclear weapons, weapons considered inherently immoral (Fichtelberg 2006 ) and then data mining systems for surveillance. Concerns about intrusiveness and violations of privacy also emerged in the comments. Some participants considered military work justified on grounds of 'national defence' and others were totally opposed, but there were also participants who considered particular aspects of military work justified in some circumstances, for instance to make small arms safer or to understand the 'harmful' features of landmines and cluster bombs to make proposals to the United Nations about them. However, the harmful features of landmines and cluster bombs are well known and the only research requirements are for improved techniques for removing landmines. The Convention on Cluster Munitions entered into force in 2010 (Anon 2017 ), but there is not yet one on landmines. Making small arms 'safer' for users risks increasing rather than reducing their use.

Just over half the participants had participated in education or training on ethical issues as part of their university or vocational training and a third had participated in subsequent training, all voluntarily in the latter case. The overwhelming majority appreciated this education or training, including for helping them put their work into a wider perspective and supporting study and research on 'societal issues'. However, there were very varied approaches and amounts of time involved and the limited ethical training available was noted in additional comments. It is also worrying that nearly half the participants had not had ethical education or training as part of their initial qualification, though this may be due to many participants having studied before this became widespread. A highly prescriptive approach to the provision of ethics education and training is undesirable and would probably restrict creativity and a full coverage of the subject. However, there may be a need for stronger guidance. I would also suggest that there is value in a combined approach with both stand-alone ethics modules to cover basic principles and theory and the integration of ethics into other teaching. The latter can be very important in showing that ethics should be an integral part of all aspects of engineers' and scientists' work and not an extra.

While some respondents had a fairly traditional approach focussing on the need for national defence in line with just war theory (Norman 1995 ), others had considered relationships, equality issues and wider social and environmental issues, including the need to use human and financial resources for 'socially progressive purposes' in line with the ethics of care (Gilligan 1982 ) and moves beyond technical considerations (Nieusma and Tang 2012 ). Participants' comments showed that many of them had a vision of the type of society they would like their work to contribute to. A personal ethical commitment was important to several of the respondents with honesty and integrity the most frequently cited ethical factors that affected their professional lives and decision-making, in line with the literature (Loui 2005 ).

8 Conclusion

The paper draws on the literature and an empirical survey of scientists and engineers to investigate four questions related to ethical issues, values, professional ethics, military work and gender. The results extend the author's previous work in AI and Society on narrative ethics and science, technology and values (Hersh 2014 , 2016 ). They also parallel continue discussion of some important themes in AI and Society, including narratives and the construction of technology and/or values, gender and human-centred design.

Engineers were originally military troops who built and operated military machinery (Tonso 1996 ) and there are still strong links between engineering, science and the military. Technological developments have changed the nature of war and violent conflict, including through enabling killing at great distances, greatly increasing the number of casualties. They have reduced distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, so engineers and engineering technicians are possibly now the new frontline troops (Blue et al. 2013 ). The answers to the four questions presented in Sect. 1.3 will now be discussed.

In ethical terms, military work raises basic issues of avoiding or doing harm. Specific issues include the nature of the uses of weapons systems, including in conflict zones and countries with poor human rights records and in internal repression. Other issues relate to increasing militarisation and binary gendering of engineering and the impacts on those participating in conflict, e.g. a 'playstation' attitude to killing (UN 2010 ), as well as the extent and nature of conflict, the resulting loss of life and the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Further issues relate to the resulting dependence of communities on military involvement, giving a need for diversification plans (STUC 2015 ; Unite 2016 ) and the diversion of resources from other problems, including peacebuilding approaches to resolving conflict (Hersh 2015a ).

Ethical views and values were important to many participants with a stress on personal ethical commitment, with a focus on honesty and personal and scientific integrity (Loui 2005 ). Some participants expressed traditional views based on the need for national defence or relied on an ethical policy, without investigating whether it covered the relevant issues. Ethical factors which affected day-to-day professional decision-making included work ethics, professionalism, well being, avoiding harm, public safety, group development, mutual support, honesty and the freedom to exercise judgement. However, further work is required on how ethical views and values translate into professional practice.

Both the literature and the survey indicate that there is some awareness of wider issues and that in the case of survey participants this influenced their practice. Engineering education is increasingly integrating social and technical concerns and paying attention to social justice (Nieusma 2013 ). Wider issues raised by participants included impacts on people, animals and the environment. Some participants expressed concerns about relationships, providing support for colleagues in line with the ethics of care (Gilligan 1982 ) and the need for measures to encourage women and members of minority groups into science and engineering, in line with recognition of their exclusion (Seymour and Hewitt 1997 ). Job choices were influenced by wider issues including the employer's ethics and culture, avoiding harm, e.g. warfare, and particular issues related to data use, climate change, poverty and rights.

The role of gendered perspectives appears more clearly in the literature than survey responses. However, participants were aware of (gender and race) equality issues and the need to open up engineering more widely and in some cases had taken measures to do this.

Engineering has been constructed as male and unsuitable for women (Pawley 2012 ; Powell et al. 2009 ). This gendering has, at least in part, been transmitted by a 'male' culture of 'tinkering' with machinery frequently given a female persona (McIlwee and Robinson 1992 ) and the transmission on of gendered knowledge from father to son (Holth and Mellström 2011 ). There has led to a binary divide with a focus on technical and professional competence as 'male' areas, but not wider social and environmental responsibilities and impacts (Blue et al. 2013 ) engineers. This 'masculinist' ideology has contributed to the exclusion of minority groups and individuals (Seymour and Hewitt 1997 ). Women were considered to disrupt engineering practices and norms simply by their presence, passion and competence for engineering (Bastalich et al. 2007 ), giving rise to a need for a change in culture. Difficulties with masculine culture and the likelihood of discomfort keeps many women out of science, engineering and technology careers (Glover et al. 1996 ) and leads others to change career after graduation (Skaggs 2013 ).

The paper enriches human-centred perspectives on ethics and design in a number of different ways. In particular, it discusses the impacts of gendered and binary perspectives, the exclusion of women and minority groups and the artificial and ethically problematical division between technical competence and wider social and environmental consequences. It considers the need for design to be carried out by those who are 'othered' and meet human needs rather than solely make a profit, as well as the importance of a focus on creation rather than destruction. The latter is particularly important when considering ethical applications of AI and related technologies. It further discusses survey results, which include the perspectives on human-centred ethics, amongst other issues, of a number of different engineers. The recommendations in the following sub-section help to bridge the gap between theory and practice. This includes through recommendations for carrying out engineering, including education, training and ethical approval, in ways that make human- and planet-centred ethics much more central. Further recommendations cover ways of making engineering culture more inclusive through gender, race and disability analysis, as well as encouragement for both individual and engineering community ethical commitments.

8.1 Recommendations

Consideration of the various issues raised in the paper has led to the following recommendations:

Education and training and ethical approval:

A much larger component of ethics in engineering and science education. This should include both stand-alone modules and integration into all teaching. It should cover the ethical implications of particular types of work and their likely outcomes, as well as the ethics of how engineers and scientists perform their roles.

Education and training in working with and involving end-users, including those from minority communities, in projects, particularly those related to technology design and development.

Production of additional case studies and other resources which cover wider ethical issues and not just professional practice, and development of a repository with links to these and existing resources.

A re-examination of the traditional restriction of ethical approval to research involving people or animals and its extension to research involving weapons or with military applications, potential harm to human health or society, or the environment and the development of toxic materials.

Organisational support:

Encouragement for engineers and scientists to join trade unions and to raise technology policy issues in them.

Setting up of forums where engineers and scientists can discuss ethical issues and obtain support from colleagues.

The professional institutions to provide a much greater lead on ethical issues and more support in the case of ethical dilemmas and whistleblowing.

Individual commitment and wider perspectives:

Application of gender, race, disability and other minority group analysis to engineering culture to make it more inclusive and decisions on technology development to make it more relevant.

Encouragement of engineers and scientists to consider their vision of the future and try to align their work with this vision and their beliefs about the type of society they would like to live in.

Encouragement of the use of a number of approaches, including narrative ethics and the ethic of care, to understand different perspectives, including those of minority groups and perceived 'enemies'.

Encouragement for engineers and scientists to make personal ethical commitments, discuss them with colleagues and in engineering and science organisations and seek support from colleagues and organisations to maintain them.

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Insomnia in United States Military Veterans: An Integrated Theoretical Model

Jaime m. hughes.

a Health Services Research & Development, Durham VA Health Care System, Durham, NC

Christi S. Ulmer

b Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University, Durham, NC

Jennifer M. Gierisch

c Department of General Internal Medicine, Duke University, Durham, NC

S. Nicole Hastings

d Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center, Durham VA Health Care System, Durham, NC

e Department of Medicine and Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, Duke University, Durham, NC

Matthew O. Howard

f School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC

Marked by difficulty falling or staying asleep and/or poor sleep leading to daytime dysfunction, insomnia contributes to functional impairment, poor health, and increased healthcare utilization when left untreated. As many as two-thirds of Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans complain of insomnia. Older veterans of prior conflicts report insomnia occurring since initial service, suggesting a chronic nature to insomnia in this population. Despite insomnia’s high prevalence and severe consequences, there is no theoretical model to explain either the onset or chronicity of insomnia in this growing patient population. Existing theories view insomnia as an acute, unidirectional phenomenon and do little to elucidate long-term consequences of such problems. Existing theories also fail to address mechanisms by which acute insomnia becomes chronic. This paper presents an original, integrated theoretical model that draws upon constructs from several prominent behavioral medicine theories to reconceptualize insomnia as a chronic, cyclical problem that is both a consequence and predictor of stress. Additional research examining the relationships between stress, sleep, resilience, and outcomes of interest could inform clinical and research practices. Addressing sleep problems early could potentially enhance adaptive capacity, thereby reducing the risk for subsequent negative outcomes.

Sleep is a basic biological need responsible for a range of restorative functions including emotion regulation and memory consolidation, muscle and tissue repair, and stress hormone regulation ( Dement & Vaughan, 1999 ). Despite its necessity, sleep is often ignored as a core health behavior, rarely addressed within biopsychosocial assessments or routine primary care visits, and generally not integrated into chronic disease management programs. Sleep problems are particularly common among United States military veterans, with one-half to two-thirds of the 2.5 million U.S. military troops who served in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom, OEF) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom, OIF) complain of insomnia problems on returning home ( Amin, Parisi, Gold, & Gold, 2010 ; Seelig et al., 2011 ). Insomnia complaints are also prevalent among veterans of earlier wars, including Vietnam and Korea conflicts. Additionally, many of these older veterans report that sleep problems initially began during or immediately following their military service and have persisted in the decades since separating from the military ( Hughes & Martin, 2015 ; Ryden et al., 2015 ).

These findings suggest insomnia problems are chronic within veteran populations; yet, a lack of longitudinal data prohibits researchers from identifying mechanisms that contribute to such chronicity and from understanding how such problems change over a veteran’s life course. Given sleep problems are tied to a number of negative physical and psychological outcomes ( Fernandez-Mendoza & Vgontzas, 2013 ), it is critical that researchers and clinicians develop a better understanding of this growing problem. The overarching goal of this paper is to offer a theoretical model of insomnia in the veteran population. Although this model can be applied to veterans of all ages and military cohorts, a major goal of the model is to place insomnia-like sleep problems of returning OEF/OIF veterans into a larger, lifespan context as a means of advocating for additional research on the role sleep problems may play in longterm health and aging. While military-specific stressors will be addressed, we believe that elements of this integrated model can be applied to other patient populations, including those who have experienced significant stress or trauma.

Insomnia in Military Veterans

Chronic Insomnia Disorder is a common behavioral sleep disorder clinically defined as dissatisfaction with sleep quantity or quality marked by complaints of difficulty falling or staying asleep, waking up earlier than desired, or sleep that is non-restorative and the cause of significant daytime impairment. Such problems are not related to other medical or sleep disorders, exist despite adequate opportunity and environment for sleep, and are endorsed three or more nights per week for three months or longer ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013 ). Insomnia and/or insomnia-like symptoms are present in 27–54% of military personnel and veterans ( Hoge, W. et al., 2008 ; Mysliwiec, McGraw, Smith, Trapp, & Roth, 2013 ), rates that are two to three times higher than in the general U.S. adult population ( Ford, Cunningham, Giles, & Croft, 2015 ; Roth, 2007 ). The rate of incident insomnia cases in military personnel saw a 19-fold increase from 2000 to 2009 ( Mysliwiec et al., 2013 ). The prevalence of insomnia among Veterans Health Administration (VHA) users is expected to continue to rise as many troops who served after September 11, 2001 continue to retire from military service and begin accessing VHA healthcare in the coming years ( Campbell, Shattuck, Germain, & Mysliwiec, 2015 ).

Risk Factors

Both modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors contribute to insomnia. This paper addresses the role of stress regulation and coping in sleep problems with a behavioral etiology. Insomnia-like sleep problems may be a function of an individual’s stress response whereby poor sleep is a function of inadequate coping and/or poor regulation of stress across physiological, cognitive, and/or emotional processes. In this context, stress refers to any event or stimulus that causes a disruption in balance, or homeostasis. Laboratory studies indicate that higher baseline levels of stress reactivity are associated with insomnia and predict future cases of the disorder ( Drake, Friedman, Wright, & Roth, 2011 ; Drake, Richardson, Roerhs, Scofield, & Roth, 2004 ). In addition, individuals with insomnia have been shown to report experiencing more daily stressors and negatively evaluating such stressors ( Morin & Ivers, 2003 ).

Initial military involvement, including enlistment and basic training, present a range of different stressors and often trigger sleep disturbance due to irregular schedules and ongoing physical, social, and emotional demands ( Peterson, Goodie, Satterfield, & Brim, 2008 ). Deployment to a war region typically requires several days of laborious travel and crossing of multiple time zones that can disrupt one’s natural circadian rhythm, or sleep schedule, and trigger sleep difficulties ( Troxel et al., 2015 ). Deployment typically involves irregular work schedules, overnight watch demands, exposure to warzone and combat-related stressors, and risk of physical and psychological injury, including traumatic brain injury. While no research has formally documented the cause, or trajectory, of insomnia in military personnel, it is likely that one or more of the aforementioned factors served as an initial trigger of insomnia symptoms.

Recent research has focused on sleep problems among active duty military personnel, including increasing rates of incident insomnia and sleep apnea diagnoses ( Mysliwiec et al., 2013 ), heightened mental health risks associated with insomnia symptoms ( Gehrman et al., 2013 ), and the link between sleep and impaired work performance ( Seelig et al., 2016 ; Troxel et al., 2015 ). Less research has focused on sleep after military retirement. Stressors related to military separation, or retirement, and reintegration into civilian life can also trigger insomnia ( Bramoweth & Germain, 2013 ). Additionally, many service members experience an inability to return to a “normal” sleep schedule after experiencing short sleep duration or irregular schedules while deployed ( Castro, Kintzle, & Hassan, 2015 ; Haynes, Parthasarathy, Bootzin, & Krakow, 2013 ). Additional reintegration-related stressors include readjustment to family and social circles, securing civilian employment, maintaining financial stability, and living with the physical and psychiatric comorbidities caused by deployment or combat-related stressors. These stressors can cause difficulty falling or staying asleep, or sleep that is restless and disturbed, thereby creating new sleep problems or exacerbating existing problems that began prior to or during deployment.

Consequences of Insomnia

Persistent insomnia can lead to poor health outcomes and chronic conditions ( Fernandez-Mendoza & Vgontzas, 2013 ; Taylor et al., 2007 ), exacerbate symptoms of traumatic brain injury ( Macera, Aralis, Rauch, & MacGregor, 2013 ), reduce overall quality-of-life ( Katz & McHorney, 2002 ), and increase risk for morbidity and premature mortality ( Dew et al., 2003 ; Kripke, Garfinkel, Wingard, Klauber, & Marler, 2002 ). Chronic sleep problems can also negatively impact day-to-day outcomes including task performance ( Pilcher & Huffcutt, 1996 ), stress coping ( Hamilton, Delwyn, & Karlson, 2007 ), and management of chronic health conditions ( Ahn, Jiang, Smith, & Ory, 2014 ).

Function, Performance and Health Management

Chronic insomnia impairs function and performance across cognitive, emotional, social, and physical domains ( Killgore, Balkin, & Westensten, 2006 ; Killgore et al., 2008 ; Pilcher & Huffcutt, 1996 ). Adequate functioning in these areas enables veterans to adapt to and cope with daily hassles and reintegration stressors noted earlier. However, impairments in one or more domains can reduce ability to cope with acute and ongoing stressors. As a result, functional performance and independence decline, thereby decreasing the likelihood of successful reintegration into civilian life ( Institute of Medicine, 2013 ; Pilcher & Huffcutt, 1996 ).

Many of these aforementioned impairments can also reduce a veteran’s capacity to cope with health-related stressors, a concept of particular interest to clinicians and health services researchers within the VHA. Medically complex patients, defined as individuals with two or more chronic conditions, who are challenged by managing such conditions ( Shippee, Shah, May, Mair, & Montori, 2012 ), represent a growing subgroup of veterans utilizing VHA healthcare ( Yoon, Schott, Phibbs, & Wagner, 2011 ; Yu et al., 2003 ). Medical complexity is often marked by a cycle of ongoing acute and chronic health-related stressors. Patients cycle through these stressors and strive to achieve and maintain a balance between workload demands (i.e. management of chronic diseases) and physical and psychological resources ( Zullig et al., 2016 ). Successful balance and management of stressors is bolstered by high physical and psychological reserve and capacity ( Zullig et al., 2016 ). These new models of complexity support the idea that capacity is malleable and can be impacted by resources, behaviors, and events on individual and community levels. Although sleep problems, including insomnia, are gaining more attention within the VHA, sleep patterns and behaviors are not explicitly addressed in these models.

Mental Health

Insomnia symptoms are common among veterans with mental health disorders. In one study, more than three-quarters reported difficulty falling or staying asleep and just over one-half reported being at least moderately distressed about sleep that was restless or disturbed ( Ulmer et al., 2015 ). Although this research sample was designed to over-recruit veterans with mental health symptoms, this same study drew attention to the notably high prevalence of sleep difficulties in veterans without a mental health diagnosis, including approximately seventy percent who met clinical criteria for poor sleep quality, defined as a score of five or greater on the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index ( Buysse, Reynolds, Monk, Berman, & Kupfer, 1989 ).

The high rate of sleep problems among veterans without mental health diagnoses is alarming given that research with veteran and non-veteran populations has found that chronic sleep problems predict incident mental health diagnoses ( Baglioni et al., 2011 ; Breslau, Roth, Rosenthal, & Andreski, 1996 ; D. Ford & Kamerow, 1989 ; Perlis et al., 2006 ) and suicidal ideation ( Pigeon, Britton, Ilgen, Chapman, & Conner, 2013 ; Pigeon, Pinquart, & Connor, 2012 ) as well as persistence of existing mental health problems, including depression ( Pigeon, Unutzer, & Perlis, 2008 ), and increased risk for readmission to a partial hospitalization psychiatry program ( Koffel, Thuras, Chakravorty, Germain, & Khawkaja, 2015 ). In a large study of OEF/OIF service members, researchers found that military personnel with predeployment insomnia symptoms had greater odds of developing depression, anxiety, and PTSD at follow-up ( Gehrman et al., 2013 ). Another longitudinal study found that insomnia measured at four months post-deployment was a significant predictor of depression and PTSD at 12-months post-deployment ( Wright et al., 2011 ).

While it is too early to examine the long-term effects of military service on OEF/OIF service members’ health, a great deal can be learned from studying the aging trajectories of veterans from earlier conflicts, including the Vietnam War. By better understanding how early or mid-life military service contributed to long-term outcomes in these cohorts, researchers and clinicians can develop new practices that can be translated into more effective and preventive-oriented care for veterans of more recent conflicts ( Marmar, 2009 ). For example, nearly 40 years after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, Marmar and colleagues (2015) noted that lifetime and current diagnoses of PTSD and major depression were prevalent among veterans.

PTSD has been linked to increased healthcare utilization and costs in veterans of recent and earlier war conflicts ( E. Hoge, Austin, & Pollack, 2007 ; Schnurr, Spiro IIII, & Paris, 2000 ). A growing line of research suggests that some veterans involved in earlier war conflicts experience premature functional decline and accelerated aging ( Lohr et al., 2015 ; Wolf et al., 2016 ) as a result of service-related experiences and injuries, including PTSD. Much of this research points to the detrimental effects of PTSD, yet little research has isolated mechanisms that link early or mid-life military experiences to PTSD and subsequent decline. While sleep problems were not measured directly in the aforementioned studies, sleep problems are a core component of PTSD diagnostic criteria ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013 ). Given this common symptom pattern, it is possible that untreated sleep problems of Vietnam Era veterans partially contributed to mid- or late-life PTSD. However, the lack of longitudinal data and absence of sleep questionnaires in this data prevent this hypothesis from being confirmed. The model presented here illustrates one potential pathway through which early life trauma and insomnia problems may impact mid- or late-life physical and mental health.

Insomnia and Resilience as Missing Links between Military Service and Poor Outcomes

Insomnia problems contribute to negative health outcomes and can become chronic, surfacing repeatedly over one’s life course. However, mechanisms contributing to this chronicity have not been identified. The mechanisms linking sleep problems, including insomnia, to new mental health diagnoses remain unclear. However, one hypothesized explanation is that chronic poor sleep reduces one’s coping abilities. As a result, when subsequent stressors do arise, individuals with sleep problems respond with reduced coping abilities ( Gehrman et al., 2013 ). A reduced capacity to positively cope with stress may lead to a more negative stress outcome, such as PTSD ( Benight & Bandura, 2004 ).

Researchers studying active duty military and veteran populations have a growing interest in resilience and its role in everything from operational readiness during deployment period to mental health and readjustment in the post-deployment period ( Seelig et al., 2016 ; Stanley, Schaldach, Kiyonga, & Jha, 2011 ; Troxel et al., 2015 ; Young-McCaughan, Peterson, & Bingham, 2011 ). A recent RAND report suggested that healthy sleep is critical to resilience, operationalized as service members’ performance and operational readiness, during deployment ( Troxel et al., 2015 ). Despite this growing interest, no consensus definition of resilience has been established nor have any theories describing the relationship between sleep, resilience, and health outcomes been proposed or tested. Further, most research has focused on active duty service members with a paucity of research on the role resilience, particularly when defined as a psychological construct rather than mere outcome, might play in sleep problems among veterans.

Much of the early resilience research was rooted in developmental psychology where researchers largely focused on resilience as a positive outcome in children who had experienced early-life stress or adversity ( Garmezy, 1971 ; Werner, 1995 ). However, much of this early research only examined major life events or stressors and failed to recognize how daily stressors or hassles, such as strains related to social, occupational, or financial hardships, impact resilience. Much of the stress and coping literature suggests that the cumulative impact of daily hassles is more stressful and more detrimental to an individual’s overall psychological and physical health ( Charles, Piazza, Mogle, Sliwinski, & Almeida, 2013 ; DeLongis, Coyne, Dakof, Folkman, & Lazarus, 1982 ) compared to major life events. Additionally, early resilience research ignored the concept of stress proliferation, or the idea that “stress begets stress,” meaning that individuals who experience major life stressors are more susceptible to experiencing the effects of subsequent stressors ( Pearlin, Schieman, Fazio, & Meersman, 2005 ; Pearlin & Skaff, 1996 ). As suggested earlier, veterans may face a series of stressors during the re-integration period. While not empirically tested to date, it is likely that daily hassles outnumber major life events and that many of these hassles contribute to stress-induced sleep problems, including insomnia. Furthermore, bouts of insomnia may also act as daily hassles in which the cumulative effects of these repeated bouts trigger additional stress and resulting sleep problems.

More contemporary approaches recognize resilience as a dynamic, multilevel, and multicomponent capacity for adapting to stress ( Masten, 2001 , 2007 ). This capacity draws on adaptive processes and abilities across behavioral, physiological and psychological systems. Modern conceptualizations of resilience also emphasize the role of health behaviors including sleep, diet, and physical activity as important contributors to enhancing one’s resilience ( Southwick, Bonnano, Masten, Panter-Brick, & Yehuda, 2014 ). By focusing on health behaviors, contemporary research emphasizes the importance of going “upstream” of resilience and working to identify pertinent mechanisms, such as modifiable health behaviors, that can enhance or degrade resilience.

Integrated Theoretical Model

The discussions above suggest that the causes and consequences of insomnia in U.S. military veterans are complex and that sleep may play an important role in longterm mental and physical health. Below, we present an innovative integrated theoretical model that could be used to better understand the growing problem of insomnia among military veterans. This model builds on the 3P Model of Insomnia ( Spielman & Glovinsky, 1991 ). Widely used in clinical assessment and interventions, the 3P Model provides a framework for understanding insomnia through three interrelated, sequential factors – predisposing, precipitating, and perpetuating (see Figure 1 ). These factors encompass genetic, constitutional, environmental, experiential, and behavioral contributors to sleep problems, respectively. The interaction between and progression across the three factors (“3Ps”) transform acute insomnia symptoms into a chronic insomnia disorder.

Description: This model displays the three factors of the 3P Model of Insomnia – predisposing, precipitating, and perpetuating – as well as the series of behavioral health theories that are used to further describe these three factors.

Footnote: *NOTE: Original factors of 3P model enclosed in boxes outlined in solid lines. Authors’ original integration are indicated by dashed lines. The additions to this model are meant to highlight mechanisms responsible for each of the three factors and to demonstrate the overlap between and transition from one factor to the next .

Although widely regarded as the leading explanatory model of insomnia, the 3P Model could benefit from several additions which are addressed in the remainder of the paper. Our integrated model offers a more thorough understanding of insomnia by exploring the following additions. First, the model provides greater clarification of the mechanisms operating within each of the three factors. Second, unlike the 3P Model that conceptualizes insomnia and sleep problems as a consequence of a stressful event, this model recognizes sleep problems as both a stress response (consequence) and an independent stressor (predictor) that may trigger additional, negative reactions. Third, this model explores both short- and long-term consequences of insomnia, acknowledging its potential effects of insomnia on physiological, psychosocial, and cognitive domains. Finally, this model includes a dimension of time which may encourage additional studying of long-term consequences of sleep, including consideration of stress proliferation and cyclical patterns of increased stress, poor sleep, and negative outcomes that some veterans experience, including those of earlier wars.

The primary aim of the integrated theoretical model presented here ( Figure 2 ) is to encourage a broader conceptualization of insomnia problems in U.S. military veterans. The proposed model integrates and expands upon the three major components of the 3P Model: predisposing (Boxes 1 and 2), precipitating (Box 3), and perpetuating (Box 10) factors. Drawing on constructs from several key behavioral medicine theories (see Figure 1 ), the model depicts potential mechanisms by which a stressful event (Box 3) contributes to insomnia problems (Box 11), impaired function (Box 12), reduced resilience (Box 13), and poor health outcomes (Box 14). Unlike existing theories that assume only a unidirectional relationship between stressful events and insomnia, our model proposes that insomnia is cyclical in nature. Here, insomnia is a consequence of stress and a predictor of additional stress. Insomnia impairs function, which reduces adaptive capacity, thereby increasing one’s risk for subsequent stressful events. Thus, the cycle begins anew, potentially triggering what will become a chronic problem (Pathways U and V). As shown, this model places a particular emphasis on the consequences of chronic, untreated insomnia.

Description: This figure displays an integrated conceptual model of insomnia. This model utilizes constructs from various behavioral health theories to illustrate the cyclical nature of insomnia in United States military Veterans.

Predisposing factors

Predisposing factors of insomnia refer to modifiable and non-modifiable factors such as a genetic, biological, or psychological vulnerability to stress and/or chronic health problems. The diathesis-stress model suggests individuals possess a diathesis, or predisposing characteristic(s), that increase vulnerability to a negative stress response or outcome ( Monroe & Simons, 1991 ). Such characteristics include genetic risk factors, sociodemographic factors, early trauma, personality traits, and biobehavioral developmental factors including neurological and cognitive functioning. Of note, adverse childhood experiences, including exposure to domestic violence, parental separation or divorce, and emotional or physical abuse, are more common among military servicemembers compared to non-servicemembers ( Blosnich, Dichter, Cerulli, Batten, & Bossarte, 2014 ). Not only are early life events associated with poor physical and mental health outcomes in adulthood ( Cabrera, Hoge, Bliese, Castro, & Messer, 2007 ), they may increase susceptibility to additional stressors, as described in above explanations of stress proliferation. When confronted with subsequent military or non-military stressors (Box 3), both early life events and personal characteristics may increase an individual’s risk for negative outcomes.

In addition, the theory of sleep-related stress reactivity posits that individuals with high levels of baseline stress reactivity (i.e., higher basal cortisol levels and more negative/anxious psychological dispositions) have greater susceptibility to developing insomnia (Box 2) ( Drake, Pillai, & Roth, 2014 ). High sleep-related stress reactivity is positively associated with stress susceptibility and heightened responses across physiological and psychological domains. Stress reactivity is marked by a hyperactive adrenal system (i.e., elevated levels of stress and adrenal hormones) and poor emotional and cognitive regulation, which are manifested in an inability to sleep in a high stress situation ( Drake et al., 2004 ; Harvey, Tang, & Browning, 2005 ; Perlis, Giles, Mendelson, Bootzin, & Wyatt, 1997 ). This diathesis, or predisposition to a negative outcome (Box 2), then interacts with a personal or environmental stressor such as military deployment, retirement, or reintegration-related challenges (Box 3) to trigger a stress response, as suggested by the Diathesis-Stress Model ( Monroe & Simons, 1991 ).

Precipitating factors

Precipitating factors represent major life or environmental stressors that trigger insomnia-like sleep problems. As addressed above, it is the interaction between predisposing factors, or diathesis, and an environmental stressor or event (precipitating factor) that triggers a stress response ( Monroe & Simons, 1991 ). Multiple predisposing and precipitating factors can occur sequentially or simultaneously. For some veterans, deployment-related stressors (i.e. combat exposure, service-related injury) may trigger insomnia symptoms, whereas for others, stressors related to military retirement and civilian reintegration (i.e. family obligations, occupational or financial stress, injury and/or rehabilitation challenges) may initiate these symptoms. Additionally, some veterans may experience one major stressor, or precipitating factor, while others may experience a series, of smaller, daily stressors. It is this accumulation of stressors that serves as the precipitating event for insomnia.

In addition to the interaction noted above, Lazarus and Folkman’s Transactional Model of Stress and Coping ( Glanz & Schwartz, 2008 ) builds on the diathesis-stress model to suggest that a stress response depends on a “transaction,” or interaction, between the individual and environment. This model emphasizes that an individual’s appraisal of a stressor (i.e., precipitating event) vis-à-vis susceptibility and severity (primary appraisal) (Box 4), and perceived ability to cope with a stressor (self-efficacy) (secondary appraisal) (Box 5), directly influence the coping efforts and behaviors he or she chooses to enact (Box 8). These processes are moderated by dispositional coping style (Box 7) and degree of social support (Box 6) and mediated by coping efforts, including the use of problem- or emotion-focused strategies (Box 7). For example, some veterans who perceive military culture as discouraging stress disclosure and/or that military status artificially protects against negative outcomes (Box 4) may be less likely to disclose having experienced a stressful event and therefore less likely to seek help (Box 8). Other veterans may perceive re-integration to be stressful and a trigger for other negative outcomes (i.e. additional family or occupational stress). However, if these individuals do not have strong self-efficacy, social support or coping skills, they may be less likely to seek help for stress-induced insomnia problems (Boxes 8 and 9), and, as a result, experience significant insomnia problems and related consequences. Additional factors may also impact an individual’s decision to seek care, including the availability of and access to trained sleep specialists, prior experiences with sleep or other behavioral treatments, and personal treatment preferences.

Perpetuating factors

Acute insomnia problems become chronic through a combination of the perpetuation of unhealthy sleep behaviors and the conditioned arousal resulting from an inability to achieve and/or maintain sleep and the consequential shift in sleep patterns (Pathway O). Perpetuating factors represent unhealthy sleep behaviors used to cope with poor sleep, including following an irregular sleep schedule, spending excessive time in bed even when not sleeping, or increasing alcohol or caffeine intake to either induce sleep or wakefulness, respectively (Box 10) ( Morin, 1993 ; Morin et al., 2006 ). In line with the constructs of the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping ( Glanz & Schwartz, 2008 ), positive coping efforts reduce insomnia symptoms while negative coping efforts, including those listed above, exacerbate symptoms of poor sleep. Many of these behaviors, including spending time in bed while not sleeping or attaching negative cognitions to an inability to sleep, generate feelings of frustration, fatigue, and anxiety, each of which becomes paired, or conditioned, with the bed and bedroom. Over time, these negative thoughts and behaviors reinforce an inability to initiate and maintain quality, uninterrupted sleep. Such negative associations and reinforcement demonstrate core characteristics of classical and operant conditioning, respectively ( Perlis et al., 1997 ).

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory ( McAlister, Perry, & Parcel, 2008 ) highlights several constructs central to health behavior and health promotion. When applied to sleep, these constructs aid in further explaining the mechanisms of Spielman’s perpetuating factors ( Spielman & Glovinsky, 1991 ), particularly how cognitions co-occurring with unhealthy sleep behaviors become associated with sleep. First, reciprocal determinism suggests that unhealthy sleep behaviors and a poor sleep environment are bidirectional, constantly influencing and reinforcing one another. Second, prolonged unhealthy behaviors diminish an individual’s capacity for self-regulation and self-efficacy for maintaining healthy, restorative sleep behaviors. Finally, chronic problems and frustration associated with not being able to sleep condition an individual’s sleep-related outcome expectations to be negative rather than positive. Negative expectations can discourage an individual from reducing unhealthy, maladaptive behaviors in favor of healthier coping strategies.

Proliferation of Sleep Problems

While the 3P Model of Insomnia provides a larger framework for understanding risk, development, and continuation of insomnia, it was not originally designed to address consequences of unresolved or residual sleep problems. The 3P Model suggests insomnia is experienced in a unidirectional, linear fashion and assumes that insomnia is resolved by treating perpetuating factors. Future studies of insomnia, including new iterations of the 3P model, could benefit from a more longitudinal approach. Such an approach should be applied to both epidemiological studies examining trajectories of insomnia and to treatment studies.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) is the recommended first-line treatment for insomnia ( National Institutes of Health, 2005 ; Qaseem et al., 2016 ). CBT-I targets perpetuating factors of insomnia (as shown in Box 10), including unhealthy behaviors and cognitions, and is effective in the short term (12–18 months) ( Morin et al., 2006 ). CBTI-I and other behavioral treatments have been shown to effectively reduce insomnia symptoms and severity in veterans ( Germain, Shear, Hall, & Buysse, 2007 ; Karlin, Trockel, Spira, Taylor, & Manber, 2015 ; Trockel, Karlin, Taylor, & Manber, 2014 ). However, some veterans continue to have either subthreshold or clinically significant symptoms following treatment ( Trockel et al., 2014 ). The lack of long-term follow-up (i.e. beyond 6 or 12 months after treatment completion) makes it difficult to gauge the longterm trajectories of these individuals and the number who experience future bouts of insomnia. It is unclear whether these residual problems resulted from lack of sufficient follow-up (i.e. participants need additional time to adjust to a new sleep schedule and experience full treatment effects) or whether existing interventions could benefit from one or more revisions (i.e. booster sessions, general coping strategies, or tips for managing high stress reactivity). Additionally, veterans may experience an additional stressor that triggers insomnia after completing a course of CBT-I treatment. Additional research is needed to examine the extent to which prior CBT-I treatment remains effective after experiencing subsequent stressors.

One possible explanation for the chronicity of sleep problems is impaired and/or reduced coping capacity. As addressed in the first portion of this paper, poor sleep contributes to impaired cognitive and functional performance (Box 12). In line with these findings and laboratory studies demonstrating impaired performance following sleep deprivation, it is hypothesized that reduced function resulting from chronic sleep problems also negatively impact an individual’s reserve or adaptive capacity to respond to subsequent stressors (Box 12). This prediction is in line with health-related definitions of resilience, defined as a dynamic process of physiological and psychological adaptation to acute and chronic stress ( Irwin, 2014 ; Lavretsky, 2014 ). Over time, chronic sleep problems, particularly sleep deprivation, lead to an ever-increasing allostatic load on physiological and psychological systems ( McEwen, 2006 ; McEwen & Karatsoreso, 2015 ), thus contributing to excessive “wear and tear” on the body ( Seeman, Singer, Rowe, Horwitz, & McEwen, 1997 ). Increasing allostatic load reduces the likelihood that an individual is able to successfully respond to or cope with subsequent stressors ( Juster, McEwen, & Lupien, 2010 ; McEwen & Karatsoreso, 2015 ). This reduced stress capacity then contributes to poor physical and psychological health outcomes (Box 14).

There may be benefits to future research examining how impaired coping capacity may interact with high levels of stress reactivity, and what impact this combination of factors may have on future bouts, or relapses, of insomnia. If such an interaction is present, it may be that innovative hybrid interventions, such as those informed by principles of CBT-I and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) may be effective in targeting both unhealthy sleep behaviors and underlying stress reactivity. MBSR has been shown to reduce physiological and psychological stress reactivity ( Sharma & Rush, 2014 ) and an initial test of one such hybrid program, Mindfulness Based Therapy for Insomnia, which combines principles of CBT-I and MBSR, demonstrated promising results in reducing severity of insomnia symptoms ( Ong et al., 2014 ). Although CBT-I curriculum teaches sleep-related coping strategies, it does not include more general stress and coping strategies. Integrating some of these strategies into behavioral sleep treatments may improve long-term coping and help reduce the likelihood of chronic insomnia.

Future directions

The proposed theoretical model highlights the etiological and clinical complexity of insomnia in U.S. military veterans, placing a particular emphasis on untreated insomnia problems. Severe sleep problems, such as insomnia, might occur at one point in time, typically triggered by a major life or environmental stressor, but their antecedents are found early in life and their consequences can extend for years or decades beyond the triggering stressful event(s). The model presented herein is meant to encourage researchers and clinicians to apply lifespan models to the problems of stress, insomnia, and health outcomes in veterans. While longitudinal data collection is time and resource intensive, such information would allow researchers to better understand the temporal nature and interrelationships between stressful events, sleep problems, and negative physical and psychological outcomes. Although not shown in this model, insomnia may co-occur with other sleep disorders, including sleep disordered breathing, restless leg syndrome, and chronic nightmares. Future iterations of the model should take a holistic approach to sleep and acknowledge these other common sleep disorders.

Sleep problems, particularly insomnia, are often assumed to be an acute consequence of deployment or reintegration. However, this model highlights the potential cyclical nature of insomnia, noting that chronic problems can deleteriously impact veterans’ long-term health and function. This model also highlights the importance of studying major life events and daily stressors as both predictors and consequences of insomnia problems. Finally, as alluded to above, sleep and resilience are likely important yet under-studied mechanisms in veterans’ long-term health. Additional research focusing on the multidimensional nature of resilience, including how physiological and psychological adaptive capacities contribute to an individual’s stress response, is warranted. Future research examining these relationships and mechanisms could prove fruitful in both clinical and research settings, particularly as an increasing number of OEF/OIF veterans retire from military service and begin to utilize both VA and community healthcare services. As our theoretical model suggests, addressing sleep problems early could potentially enhance a veteran’s adaptive capacity, thereby reducing the risk for negative physical and psychological outcomes across the lifespan. Finally, the constructs and mechanism outlined in this particular model may have application to non-veterans, including individuals who have experienced a significant life stressor or traumatic event. Future iterations of the model should highlight the mechanisms of insomnia and comorbid mental and physical health conditions.

• Chronic insomnia problems are highly prevalent among US military Veterans
• Existing theoretical models view insomnia as a unidirectional phenomenon
• An integrated model is proposed that explains insomnia as a chronic, cyclical problem
• Insomnia should be viewed as a both a consequence and predictor of stress

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to think Wizdom Powell, PhD, MPH who provided comments on an initial version of the conceptual model and manuscript.

Role of Funding Sources

This work was supported by facilities and resources at the Center of Innovation for Health Services Research in Primary Care at the Durham VAMC (CIN 13-410); Office of Academic Affiliations, VA Health Services Research & Development (TPH 21-000), and University of North Carolina Program on Integrative Medicine (Hughes: NIH/NCCIH T32AT003378). None of the funding sources had a role in developing this material, writing the manuscript, or the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Abbreviations

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Contributors

Conflict of Interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

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Military rank affects medical care, offering societal insights: Study

Human relationships are inherently shaped by power dynamics, yet quantifying their impact has remained a scientific challenge.

Now, a large new study published Thursday in the journal Science reveals that military doctors give more attention to higher-ranked patients, providing concrete evidence about the privileges that come with elevated status, frequently at the expense of the less powerful.

"One of the things we are trying to show is that this is not a military-specific analysis," said co-author Manasvini Singh of Carnegie Mellon University, arguing the findings are just as relevant to civilian life as they are to the rigid chain-of-command structures of the armed forces.

For their research, Singh and co-author Stephen Schwab of the University of Texas at San Antonio examined 1.5 million doctor-patient encounters in the US military health service's records.

Rather than exploring how doctors might respond differently to, say, generals versus privates, they chose a more nuanced approach: comparing how soldiers of equal rank, for example two majors, were treated in emergency departments (EDs) by physicians who either outranked them or were outranked by them.

The "high-power" patients who outranked their doctors received 3.6 percent more effort and resources, as measured by tests, diagnosis and treatment codes, time spent with the physician , and opioids prescribed. High-power patients also had better outcomes, with a 15 percent lower likelihood of hospital admission in the following 30 days.

Further analysis revealed an unwitting spillover effect: low-power patients often received less attention from doctors who had just seen a high-powered patient, possibly due to the extended effort invested in the prior visit.

To ensure their results were generalizable to the population at large, the researchers considered demographic factors like age, race, and sex, which impact outcomes in wider society.

"We found if a patient walks into an ED and is assigned to a white physician who is higher rank than them, the patient is better off being white than black," said Singh.

A Black patient that outranks their white physician receives more effort than if they were lower ranked than their doctor, but still less effort than equivalent white patients. Black physicians on the other hand put in very high effort for high-ranking Black patients.

While the military's ranking system differs from civilian life, Singh argues that other factors, like increased camaraderie and kinship, could mitigate this effect.

The paper's findings even generalize beyond medicine, helping explain why Black students do better under Black teachers or why landlords are more likely to evict vulnerable tenants even when the cash value of missed payments is constant, she said.

In a related commentary, Laura Nimmon of the University of British Columbia said the research raised important questions about whether medical education sufficiently addresses status, authority, and class bias.

"Efforts remain necessary to better understand facets of power, including the failures of education and health care systems to address the myth that physicians are perfectly altruistic and not corrupted by power," she said.

Laura Nimmon et al, The complexity of physician power, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adp5154

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“The End of Everything,” with Victor Davis Hanson

Classicist Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of hundreds of articles, book reviews, and newspaper editorials on Greek, agrarian, and military history and essays on contemporary culture.

“The End of Everything,” With Victor Davis Hanson

Classicist Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of hundreds of articles, book reviews, and newspaper editorials on Greek, agrarian, and military history and essays on contemporary culture. He has written or edited twenty-four books, the latest of which is The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation . The book—and this conversation—charts how and why some societies choose to utterly destroy their foes and warns that similar wars of obliteration are possible in our time. Hanson provides a warning to current societies not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

To view the full transcript of this episode, read below:

Peter Robinson: It may not happen often, but sometimes, sometimes, entire civilizations die in a single day. Historian Victor Davis Hanson on Uncommon Knowledge Now. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge.

Peter Robinson: I'm Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution here at Stanford. Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian. Dr. Hanson has published more than two dozen major works of history, including A War Like No Other, his classic work on the Peloponnesian Wars. Victor Davis Hanson's newest book, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation. Victor, thanks for joining me.

Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you for having me, Peter.

Peter Robinson: First question, The Destruction of Thebes by Alexander the Great, The Obliteration of Carthage by the Romans, The Defeat of Constantinople by the Turks, and The Destruction of the Aztecs by Cortez. Those are your four case studies in this book. All those happened a while ago. Why write this book now?

Victor Davis Hanson: I was curious, most of my career, I've been curious why Thebes, or I can go into the details, but why these...

Peter Robinson: We'll come to it.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, we'll come to it.

Victor Davis Hanson: Why these civilizations were not just defeated, but were annihilated. And there were others. I had, there's a wide array in the ancient world, the island of Milos, towns in the Peloponnesian war like Schioni, et cetera. And this is very different than natural disasters like the Mycenaeans, et cetera. But I was wondering if there was a typology, a repeating pattern, and if it would be applicable to any of the value. And I found that there was, both on the part of the attacker, certain a mindset, and on the part of the defender, and that those situations that we think could not happen today, because we're supposedly a postmodern moral world.

Peter Robinson: We're more advanced than they were, Victor.

Victor Davis Hanson: That's what we think. And it's there...So in the epilogue, I just did a brief survey. Well, not a brief survey, but I did a survey of countries that are very vulnerable as described, either in the nature of their enemies and the intent of their enemies, or the neighborhood in which they reside, or their size, or their limits. So for example, there's only 12 million Greeks in the world.

Peter Robinson: Right.

Victor Davis Hanson: There's Cypriots, but Greeks, and they have a lot, they have a bad neighborhood, and they have been existentially threatened by the Turks, especially the present government. Israel is another example. The Kurds are an example. The Armenians are still an example. And all of them have had a history where at times people thought they would be existentially gone, because that was the intent. And yet, we feel that today when somebody threatens to wipe somebody out, either with nuclear weapons or with conventional weapons, we discount that. That can't happen.

Peter Robinson: It's mere hyperbole.

Victor Davis Hanson: In the epilogue, I think I mentioned maybe a half a dozen, or maybe even a dozen direct threats by various Turkish figures, Russian, Chinese, where they actually threaten to destroy and wipe out, whether it's Ukraine or Taiwan, or the Armenians, or Greeks, or Israel.

Peter Robinson: And the argument is, take that possibility seriously, because every so often it really does happen.

Victor Davis Hanson: Maybe so often the exception that nobody thinks, the unimaginable, or what people think it can't happen here does happen here.

Peter Robinson: The end of everything presents almost 300 pages of your usual approach, which is meticulous, thorough, and engrossing historical writing.This is television.We can't go into it that deeply.But I would like to touch on these case studies at least briefly, because even put in some reform, my feeling was as I went through the book, even in some reform, every one of them is just fascinating and surprising in some way. All right. Thebes, the end of everything, I'm quoting you. In 335 BC, the Thebans not only revolted against the Macedonian occupation of Greece, but defiantly dared Alexander the Great to take the legendary city, that is to take Thebes itself. He did just that. All right. Briefly, the significance of Thebes, it was a major city. Who were the Macedonians? Set it up. Who were the Macedonians? And who is this brilliant figure who arises as a very young man, Alexander the Great?

Victor Davis Hanson: Well for 20 years prior to 335, Philip II of Macedon...

Peter Robinson: Alexander's father.

Victor Davis Hanson: Alexander's father had taken a backwater area that was deprecated as uncivilized by Greeks.

Peter Robinson: The northern mountainous region.

Victor Davis Hanson: The mountainous region of today is parts of northern Greece and the autonomous state of so-called Macedon, Macedonia. And he had forged a imperial power. He borrowed...he was a hostage at Thebes when he was a young man himself and he learned from the great master of Pamanondas about Greek military tactics. He lengthened the Sarissa. He did all of his military war.

Peter Robinson: The Sarissa is..

Victor Davis Hanson: Pike. So he innovated and improved on Greek phalanx warfare, fighting in Colum. And it was a juggernaut and he came from the north and he conquered at the Battle of Carinea three years prior to this. He destroyed Greek freedom by this...basically it was an army of Thebans and Athenians and a few other city states and they were conquered and they were occupied and there was no longer a truly consensual government in these cities, 1500 city states.

And he had a plan or an agenda that said, "I will unite you and even though you think I'm semi-barbarous..." Macedonian, it was sort of hard to understand. You could understand it, the language and the tradition. But it had no culture, the Greeks thought, but we're going to unite and take Persia and pay them back for a century of slights and get rich in the process.

And the Greeks revolted in 335. He died, he was assassinated and he had his 21-year-old son who had been at the Battle of Carinea at 18 and had been spectacular in defeating the Theban and they didn't take him seriously.

Peter Robinson: The Thebans or the Greek city states in general?

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, they thought, "You know what?"

Peter Robinson: He's a kid.

Victor Davis Hanson: And who's going to take over from Philip II? He was a genius and he's got bastard children here and concubines there and he's got this one guy named Alexander and it's, "Don't take him, we're going to revolt." And everybody said, "Well, we hear about him and he's kind of fanatic, be careful, but we're willing to revolt if you revolt first." And Thebes was at this time legendary because it's the legendary home of Oedipus and Antigone. It's the fountain of Greek mythology. It has kind of a dark history because bad things happen at Thebes like Oedipus kills his father or Antigone is executed.

Peter Robinson: Not a lot of cheerful stories.

Victor Davis Hanson: In Euripides' Bacchae, it's under the shadows of Mount Cthyrum. But the point is that it had been under a Pamanondas, a Pythagorean, enlightened society. The first really expansive democracy was trying to democratize the Peloponnese. So it was the moral leader at this point. It happened to be...

Peter Robinson: Roughly how big a population is.

Victor Davis Hanson: It was small. It was somewhere between 15 and 25,000 citizens and maybe at most 5 or 10,000 residents. But it was the capital of what we would call today in English a province called Boeotia. And that probably had somewhere around 150 to 250 and it was the capital that subjugated that.

Peter Robinson: Okay.

Victor Davis Hanson: But it has separate dialect, Theban dialect was different than the Boeotian dialect and it was the stellar city. So Alexander then says, "If you revolt, we're going to come down." So he eliminates his enemies. He starts to march. The Athenians are egging the Thebans on and said, "Don't worry, we'll come." And the Spartans are going to come, both of them in decline. And the long and the short of it is he arrives there. The Thebans mock him. They think we can replay the Battle of Carinea, we'll win. And all of a sudden, when he shows up, they have no idea who he is. They don't know what he's intending. Had they studied his career, they would see he's a killer and he's a genius and he's about ready to conquer the Persian Empire. And he needs to have a solid home front and he means business and he doesn't play by the rules. And the rules of Greek warfare, except for the Peloponnese, you don't destroy your enemy. You don't, even Athens as it lost the Peloponnesian War, they did not destroy Athens. The Spartans and the Thebans. So Spartans say they're going to come, the Athenians are going to help them, they egg them on, they revolt, they kill the Macedonian garrison, are they imprison them? And Alexander pulls up with this huge army. You can't get 200 miles from the north in 10 days. You can if you're Alexander. You march at 20 plus miles a day. He pulls up, they build siegecraft and...

Peter Robinson: Is it fair to say he's a little bit like Napoleon?

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.

Peter Robinson: He's shocking.

Victor Davis Hanson: He's quick, or Caesar, quickness of Caesar and Napoleon, audacity, it's like Donton. And the Spartans dissipate and the Athenians dissipate.

Peter Robinson: You're on your own.

Victor Davis Hanson: You're on your own and they think, this is the seven gates of Thebes, the magnificent walls of Thebes. We've only been broached once after the Persian War. We can endure, we're on the defensive, we've got this wonderful army, we'll go out in front of the...and they're defeated. And they think...

Peter Robinson: But not just defeated.

Victor Davis Hanson: Not defeated. They think they can negotiate, I think. And he says, "I'm gonna kill every single person that's over the age of 16. I'm gonna enslave every woman and child." But you know what? I will save the descendants of Pindar, the poet, his house, and maybe some religious shrines and he levels the city down to the foundations and there are no more Thebans. Later the Macedoians will take the site and bring in other people, other Greeks.

And so there is no longer a Theban who have been there for two millennia. They're gone.

Peter Robinson: They have their own culture, their own history. It is recognized as such by the entire Greek-speaking world and they even have their own, not quite their own language, but their own dialect. And it just ends.

Victor Davis Hanson: And some of the surrounding Vyoshan villages, of course, don't like them so they join Alexander and they haul off the marble columns, they haul off the roof tiles, they level it. After Alexander's death, some two decades later, they think it's be good propaganda to refound Thebes and they call it Thebes, which is the modern city today, but it's not the same culture.

Peter Robinson: Okay, that's example number one. By the way, do we have, from contemporary sources, who would have written about that? What effect did that event have? It shocked all the other Greek city states into total submission?

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, they could not believe it. They completely folded and it was...

Peter Robinson: So he got the stable home base he wanted that permitted him to advance into...

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. And it became, even among the Macedonians, it became shameful that Alexander had destroyed this legacy city, the fountain, as I said, of Greek mythology and of Paminondas, the great liberator, his legacy Pythagoras, the Pythagorean group there, and he'd wipe them out and they regretted it later. But at the time, nobody came to their aid. They were very confident. They didn't think anybody would ever do that and they were shocked. It was something that had not happened before.

Peter Robinson: Carthage.

Peter Robinson: Rome and Carthage, The End of Everything, your book, the three centuries long growth of the Roman Republic, this is BC, we're not at Caesar, we're certainly not close to Augustus, we're seeing Rome grow from a city to the dominant force in the Mediterranean. The three centuries long growth of the Roman Republic was often stalled or checked by its formidable Mediterranean rival Carthage on the other side of the Mediterranean, at the northern tip of, northern edge of Africa. The competition between Rome and Carthage involved antithetical civilizations.

Peter Robinson: Explain that.

Victor Davis Hanson: Carthage was founded about the same time as Rome was, but it was... We use the word, they use, it's an ancient word, Punic, and all that is, is a Phoenician transliteration for Phoenician culture that would be today where Gaza is along that area. This was a colony, colonists founded under the mythical Dido at what is modern Tunisia, right? Just 90 miles opposite, it's the narrowest point of the Mediterranean. 90 miles opposite Sicily.

Peter Robinson: 90 miles..thats Sicily, yes.

Victor Davis Hanson: And they were a Punic-Semitic culture, so their language was not linguistically related to Greek or Latin. They did things that classical culture abhorred such as child sacrifice. However, they did, were heavily influenced by Greek constitutional history, so they actually had a constitutional system. They learned about Western warfare from Spartan taskmasters. And so they fought these series, what we call the Punic War, first and second.

Unfortunately for Rome, they were confronted with an authentic Alexander Napoleon-like figure in Hannibal who took the war home.

Peter Robinson: Second Punic War, he goes across into what is now Spain.

Peter Robinson: And goes behind the Roman line, so to speak, famously taking elephants up over the Alps and then wreaking havoc.

Victor Davis Hanson: From 219 to 202, this war went on.

Peter Robinson: In Italy itself.

Victor Davis Hanson: In a series of battles at the river Caecanius, Trebia, Lake Trasimone and Canai, he killed or wounded a quarter million Italians. And he ran wild for over a decade in Italy until Scipio Africanus invaded Tunisia and forced him to come home. But when I'm getting it.

Peter Robinson: To defend his home.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, and he lost the Battle of Zama. He was exiled. But that was such a trauma or wound in the Italian mind. It was always Hannibal ad Portis. They scared little kids with, "Hannibals at the gates." And they were traumatized. So they had given a very punitive piece to the Carthaginians and they said, "You're going to pay this huge fine and you can never make war without our permission. You're going to surrender all of your European and Sicilian colonies. You're going to have it and you're going to be largely confined to the city of Carthage and some satellite villages."

Peter Robinson: So the Romans, I'm thinking now of a phrase that was used by Madeleine Albright to describe what we had done to Saddam Hussein.The Romans had Carthage in a box.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. That was the idea.

Peter Robinson: So may I set up the third Punic War here, which brings us to the event to which this chapter is dedicated. I'm quoting the end of everything. After the first two Punic Wars, there was no call at Rome to level a defeated Carthage and yet Rome attacks Carthage again. Why?

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, it's very ironic and tragic because they paid the identity off early.

Peter Robinson: The Carthaginians did.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. They were Carthaginians and they discovered that without these overseas colonies and given their prime location in North Africa. I've got to remember that this time North Africa was the most fertile part of the Mediterranean, much more fertile than the shores of Europe, southern shores. And so they sent a delegation three years earlier to Carthage to inspect what was going on and how did they pay the fine off and they were astounded. The city had somewhat 500,000 to 600,000 people in it. It was booming. It was lush. The countryside was lush. They were confident and unfortunately for them...

Peter Robinson: And they had one of the great ports of the ancient world.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, it was the part of Carthage. It's about 20 miles from modern Tunis today. Was starting to rival Rome again and yet they professed no bellicosity at all. They said, "You know, we have no problem with you."

Peter Robinson: We've learned our lesson.

Victor Davis Hanson: We learned our lesson. We're just a mercantile. They were sort of re-fashioning themselves from an imperial power to something like Singapore or Hong Kong.

Victor Davis Hanson: And Rome unfortunately was in this expansionary mood. They had now consolidated Spain. They had consolidated Italy. They consolidated much of Greece and soon would conquer all of Greece and Macedon and they had Cato the Elder and he got up, you know, legendarily and say, "Carthage must be destroyed as the epithet of every speech." So there was...

After the inspectors came back, they said, "These people are insidious. They may not have Hannibal but they're going to rival us again."

Peter Robinson: They're doing too well.

Victor Davis Hanson: They're doing too well and we've got all... There were people in the Roman Senate that said, "No, no, don't do that." They don't pose a threat and actually they're good for us because the more that they're there they put us on guard and they don't...we don't get luck. The Romans had this idea that affluence and leisure make you decadent. So just the fact that they're right across the Mediterranean means it will always be vigilant.

Peter Robinson: The competition is good for us, Cato.

Victor Davis Hanson:  Yes. Kind of what Americans used to think, 19th century. So unfortunately they decided that they would present Carthage with a series of demands that could not possibly be met and still be autonomous. So they sent a group from the Senate down to consuls. Consular army was rare but they brought two consuls in an army and they landed them there and they said to them, "You're going to move your city at least 15 miles from the ocean. You're not going to be a sea power." If you get mad about it, we're the same way. We're Rome, we have Ostia, we're from the end. No problem. But you're going to destroy this ancient city and then you're going to have to move lock, stock and barrel. And by the way, we want all of your arms. We want your elephants, your famous elephants. They have personal names even. We want your elephants, we want your siege craft, we want your armor, we want everything.

Peter Robinson: You’ll live.

Victor Davis Hanson:  And if you're willing to do that, we'll consider that the city can live.And they were willing to do that. Not to move. They sent a delegation. They said, "Okay, here's our catapults, here's our body armor and we'll negotiate about the rest." They went back and they think, "I think we're okay." And then they went back the next time and the Romans who were camped away with this huge army said, "You know..."

Peter Robinson: You said that the Romans took an army across the Mediterranean.

Victor Davis Hanson: It's in Utica, right near them, about 20 miles away.

Peter Robinson: That was bigger than the landing force in the invasion of Normandy.

Victor Davis Hanson:  Yes.

Peter Robinson: It was a vast force.

Victor Davis Hanson: Our sources are somewhat in disagreement but it could have been anywhere from 70 to 90 to 100,000 people. It took us all day to land 135,000, us being the British and the Americans. But the Americans themselves did not have as many people as the Romans landed at Utica. And so the Romans then told all of the Carthaginian allies on the North Coast, "Are you with us or against us? Because if you're with us, we're going to destroy them and you're going to be a favored colony. You're going to get to share in the spoils. We won't tax you. You'll be the guys that run North Africa for it." If you're with them, we're going to do to them what you...And so most of them, not all defect. And then the legates come back and they tell the Carthaginians, "We blew it. They're going to kill us. And now we have no weapons because they're going to make us move." We thought if we turned in our weapons, they might not make us move. So they bring out of retirement, Hasrbal, who's this fanatic, not the famous Hasrbal, father of Hannibal, but another named Hasrbal. And he's a complete maniac and they had not trusted him. And he says, "Kill all the legates. Anybody who was an appeaser, we're in full moor. We're going to rearm." And they do. They get all the women's hair, they make catapults and they go crazy and then they put a siege around the city. The problem the Romans have is these walls are, until Constantinople, they are the greatest walls in the ancient world, 27 miles of fortifications. Carthage is on a peninsula and it's kind of like a round circle with a corridor. And they've got that all area walled and they have a fleet still and it's very hard to take that city and the Romans are not known for their siege craft and they can't take it. And they lose, lose, lose and they get the Numidian allies to join them. And suddenly, after two years, they've lost probably 20 or 30,000 Romans. Sometimes they break into the suburbs but not the main walls and it looks like it is an ungodly disaster. And they are very confident and then just in the case of Alexander, they don't know who they're dealing with. They bring out of this obscurity, Scipio Emilianus and he is the adopted nephew, grand nephew of Scipio Africanus, the famous one. And he is a philosopher like Alexander the Great. He's a man of letters. He wouldn't do such a thing. He has a Scipionic circle, playwrights, terrains. He's a friend of Polybius the Great historian just like Alexander has the student of Aristotle. So he comes and he's a legate and he's been there and he keeps saying the consuls are incompetent and they don't know what they're doing and I should be it but he's a lowly young guy. And they said, "You take over." So he comes, he gives a big lecture and says, "You guys are pathetic, his soldiers. You're lazy. This is what's going to happen." He has discipline. They build a counter wall and over the next year he turns out to be an authentic military genius. He cuts off the city. He cuts off the corridor. He cuts off all the allies supplying them and he besieges them and they will not surrender but they still have a hope that he's a man of principle and he will negotiate with them and he will give them terms and he is a killer. And he does not give them terms and he systematically breaks for the first time and only time in history the great walls of Carthage. He gets into the city and then over a two-week period he systematically kills every single person that the Romans. In fact, the descriptions are horrific.

Peter Robinson: Now, are we still dealing with half a million people or have men haven't fled by now?

Peter Robinson: No, no, it's still densely possible.

Victor Davis Hanson: They have nowhere to go. They're stuck and they're starving now. And he's...

Peter Robinson: So this is an act of butchery. Like Slaughtering and cattle or sheep.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, our sources, we have accounts in Diodorus and somewhat in Libya, Polybius fragments here and there. We're told that the Roman army has to scrape off the bodies because they've killed so many people because they're in...it's like Gaza or Fallujah or Mosul.

It's fighting in block by block and they're destroying...to get rid of the Carthaginian defenders, they're destroying the buildings and they topple and then the bodies are there and then the army can't move. So they go, go, go until they get to the pinnacle, the capital. And there is Hasrbal and his wife and of course he flips and cuts a deal with...

Peter Robinson: And on your side now, boys.

Victor Davis Hanson: He leaves his wife and they burn themselves up. And then he goes...he ends up in retirement in Italy, one of the few people who is...endures a Roman triumph and humiliated in the parade and they let him live.

Peter Robinson: and they let him live. 

Victor Davis Hanson: And then they wipe it out. I don't think it's accurate to say they sowed the ground with salt as myth goes, but they did completely declare it an inhospitable place and it was sacrosanct to even get near it. They took it down to the foundation. There is no more formal Punic center of knowledge. They had a very rich agriculture, agronomy literature. It's gone. What happens? It's remnants of people who in Augustine's time in the fifth century AD, there are still people who they claim speak Punic, very few of them. And Romans under Caesar then they make something called Carthago Nova, a new city, but it's a Roman city built on the...somewhat near the old city.

Peter Robinson: So it's gone.

Victor Davis Hanson: It's gone.

Peter Robinson: It's just disappeared.

Victor Davis Hanson: Gone. Caput.

Peter Robinson: All right. I want to get two more stories, but probably don't have time to go into as much detail.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I won't break it. Yeah, I won't go into it.

Peter Robinson: But well, these become a little bit more modern, so maybe we know a little bit more about them. I mean, maybe your listeners will know more. Constantinople. The end of everything. Quote, "The most infamous of wartime extinction was the destruction of Byzantine Constantinople on May 29, 1453." Let me just set this up to go to so I can do this set up, kind of condense the material a little bit. We have the Emperor Constantine in the very early fourth century moves the capital of the empire from Rome to this city in what is now Turkey.

It's been called Byzantium. He refounds the capital as Constantinople. Walls get erected.

It remains, it becomes a Christian, Greek speaking empire that lasts a thousand years.

Victor Davis Hanson: Beyond the West, when the West falls. A thousand years.

Peter Robinson: A thousand years after Rome itself falls. Eighth century AD, we have the rise of Islam. And now pressure begins to be brought on the Christian Byzantine empire century after century after century after century. And in 1453, on May 29th, what happens?

Victor Davis Hanson: Black Tuesday. I lived in Greece and on Black Tuesday I was awakened by my landlord to make sure that I went to mass or Greek Orthodox services to lament that the Emperor Constantine had been marbleized and saved by the archangels. And he was going to come one day and free Constantinople. So around noon, the Ottomans under Met that had brought this.

Peter Robinson: Sultan.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, Sultan. And he had, his father and everybody had said they're declining. The empire of 20 million is now shrunk down to about a million. And there's only the city of a million people because of the fourth crusade where Christians, Western Christians sacked it. It's in decline. All we have to do is wait. And it's very lucrative because it's still a beacon of Western culture in our area. So Venetians come in, Genovese come in, they bring in crossbows, they bring in gunpowder. It's very—

Peter Robinson: It's in trade with these people.

Victor Davis Hanson: Exactly. So most Sultans had let it live. And there was actually Turkish people within the city. This amendment, the great says, no, no, no, no, no, no. I am 19. I'm going to destroy this. And he systematically fortifies the Hell's Point, the entrance in the Black Sea. And he takes the Dardanelles, you can't go in or out. And he squeezes it. And when he surrounds the city, there's only about 7,000 to 8,000 actual combatants of a city that's no more than 50,000. And he thinks it's going to be easy. But the walls of Constantinople, the so-called built by the emperor Theodosus, are, they remain the most impressive walls in the world. They were a tripart system.

Peter Robinson: When you say remain, you mean today.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. You can vote you— Yes, you can see them today. Yes, you can see it.

Peter Robinson: There was a-- Istanbul, and go ahead.

Victor Davis Hanson: There's a mound, there was a moat, another mound, and then the so-called outer wall. And then with turrets, 20 to 30 feet high. And then in between a killing space of a plaza where there's nowhere to hide, and then the massive inner walls of 40 feet, and gates where they could retreat in. And no one had ever taken that. The Fourth Crusade came in through a fluke on the seaside. But no army had ever. It was like a triangle. So there was sea on the Golden Horn, sea on the sea of Marmara. And then the exposed land had the Theodosian walls, five to six miles. And they camp out there, and they cannot take it. And with this reduce, they have these brilliant Genovese that are fighting for them, some mercenary. They call to Christendom, "Help us. We're your Christian brotherhood." And they said, "Nah, you're orthodox, and we're not going to help you." They said they were.

Peter Robinson: How many forces has Mehmet got?

Victor Davis Hanson: It's debatable, but he's probably got 250,000 and probably at least 100,000.

Peter Robinson: On land?

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. The whole force is 250,000 and probably 100,000 on land. And he's got at least 10,000 cracked Janissaries, the mercenary elite. And they can't take the city.

Peter Robinson: So it says something about those walls, that 7,000 defenders can hold off 100,000.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. And they have a massive, the so-called Hungarian cannon that was built by a Hungarian. And they have these huge cannon, and they knock down holes on the walls. At night, the civilians are all mobilized. And then Gustiani, the famous Genovese merchant, gets wounded. And he is the—

Peter Robinson: The leader of the defenders.

Victor Davis Hanson: And he, even though he's Italian, he's the spiritual anchor. And he, for some reason, they withdraw the contingent. And people say, "Oh my God, he's withdrawing." And they panic. And when they leave the outer wall, they don't do it in order to get into the inner wall. They leave the gates open. And then it's every man for themselves. And it's one of the most heart-wrenching descriptions in Byzantine literature. We have about 11 different sources in Italian, Turkish, Byzantine Greek. And it's a free-for-all. And they slaughter everybody. And 7,000 go into the great church that you can go to today at Hagia Sophia. They think the archangel is going to come down and save them. He doesn't. The Janissaries break in. And it's three days of absolute slaughter, wreckage, sort of like the Fourth Crusade. But the—

Peter Robinson: More deadly. These are being-- Civilians are being slaughtered.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. And so at the end, after three days, Mehmet and the Sultan, his entourage, realized that we need somebody to run this city because we're not going to destroy it like Carthage or Thebes. We're going to take a new DNA and use it because it's a beautiful city. And we'll put Menoroth.

Peter Robinson: We could use those walls. We could use that church.

Victor Davis Hanson: We could use those walls. It's got the best location in the world. We need menorets on Hagia Sophia. We'll turn it into a mosque. So they get a few there. And within 50 years, they have wiped out what had one time been 20 million Byzantine Christian Greek speakers. In the ancient home, the Seljuk Turks who became Ottomans were not indigenous to that area. Something Mr. Erlian today does not understand. This was from time memorial a Greek-speaking area way back. Now it never would be again.

Peter Robinson: Cardinal-- St. John Henry Newman referred in this history, he referred to the Turks as the people who had destroyed half the civilized world. He was very conscious that Byzantine culture represented half of Christendom up until it was gone. Okay. But what is the legend that you referred to at the very beginning?

Victor Davis Hanson: Constantine didn't die.

Peter Robinson: That the last emperor—

Peter Robinson: - was turned into marble.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, he's marbleized. And he went into a secret chamber in Hagia Sophia. And he was lifted up into heaven. And he's in suspended animation. And in 1928-21, there was the Megala Iida, the idea that after World War I, Greeks had bet on the winning side and Turks had been on the losing side and they were going to reform. And they got almost to Ankara. And then—

Peter Robinson: The Greeks did.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. And maybe he was going to come out of marbleization and they would have Constantinople as the spiritual, political, religious home of Hellenism again. And then, of course, they were betrayed by the Europeans. They cut off and they were slaughtered.

Peter Robinson: So we have-- and that is an extinction. Well, I suppose the most dramatic way of describing how completely it ended, we still have Orthodox. We still have the Orthodox Church.We still have devout Greeks who remember that day and shake young Victor awake and saying, you must remember this day with us. You must go to Orthodox Mass. But Hagia Sophia, which was for centuries the largest church in Christendom, is now a mosque.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. And today, if you or I were to walk along Ionia and see the ancient-- the richest part of Hellenism, the ancient-- or the pre-Socratic philosophers, the lyric poets were if we went to Didama or Pergamum or Ephesus or Miletus, it's Ottoman Muslim culture, Turkish. If we went to Constantinople, especially under Mr. Erdogan, it's—

Peter Robinson: There's no current leader of Turkey.

Victor Davis Hanson: There are Christian churches are being shut down. And this was a UN historical site, Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral. And now it is a mosque again under his leadership.

Peter Robinson: Well, it was a museum and now it's back to being a—

Victor Davis Hanson: He took it away from its UN status and made it into a mosque. And there are no Greeks to speak of who speak Greek and openly are Christian in all of what was a 20 million person. There is no such thing as Hellenism or Greek speakers outside of Cyprus and Greece except the diaspora, say, in Europe, the United States. He extinguished it.

Peter Robinson: This brings us to the last of these four, which I'm going to try to-- this is like turning an ox into a bullion cube here. We're engaging in an act of compression victory. Hernán Cortés lands in Mexico in 1519. He has 500 soldiers, about 100 sailors. The sailors climb out of their ships and march with him. He has 600 men, some horses, some guns. And two years later, he destroys the Aztec capital, 1521. And well, let me quote you. "Although they had become familiar with Aztec civilization over the prior two years, the Spanish almost immediately sought to obliterate its religion, race, and culture. In their view, they had more than enough reasons to destroy the Aztec empire." Close quote. Now, the book describes the way Cortés does-- he's a politician as well as a general. And he discovers that many of the subject tribes in the area hate the Aztecs. So he assembles a force that he can use against the Aztecs. The history here is rich and fascinating. It is an astonishing story of how this small Spanish force conquers Mexico.

But what I want to get to-- the Spaniards had more than enough reasons to destroy the Aztec empire. Could you explain that a little bit? This was not just raw hunger for land. It wasn't just gold lust. What else was going on?

Victor Davis Hanson: Unfortunately, for the Az-- Tenochtitlán, the historic capital, they had an empire of four million people. And they-- this was 1492 to 1519 was only 30 years, not even that. So they didn't really know what-- the Westerners didn't know what was in Mexico. They'd heard of this legendary—

Peter Robinson: 1492 being Columbus' first encounters, the new one.

Victor Davis Hanson: And Cortés was a minor official. He wasn't a general. He wasn't-- he was just-- he was an entrepreneur. And he got it in his head that he got temporary permission from the governor of Cuba to form this tiny force and go explore. But he knew that he wanted to do more than that. So he goes in, he marches, and he's entertained. They cannot-- they think he's-- it's debatable whether they really think he's a god. But they've never seen people with white skin. They've never seen people with armor. They think the horses and the man are one person. They're centaurs. They think the dogs are-- they've never seen these mass-steeped dogs before. They've never heard gunpowder before. They have no idea what steel is. Steel. They use obsidian blades. They don't know what Toledo steel is. They have no idea what the wheel is. They've never seen-- except in toys. So these guys come and they think they're gods. And then the more they see, they like to eat, they like to drink, they like to have sex. They bleed and they start to get wary. So there's a faction. And on the Nochetriste, the sad night of sorrows, they almost get completely slaughtered. And they're chased out. They come back with more soldiers. Never at one time did he ever have in one place more than 1,500 soldiers. Unfortunately for the Aztecs, they were not dealing with Plymouth Rock and pilgrims. They were dealing with the most warlike, deadly Europeans in the world. They were dealing with the Spanish who had just finished the Reconquista and fought for 300 years against Islam. They had been fighting during the Reformation field. They had been in Italy.

Peter Robinson: By the way, both of those are religious wars.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. And the people who came with Cortez were some of the most brilliant-- Pedro Alvarado, people like that-- some of the most skilled soldiers. And they had horses. And they loved to fight. And they were accompanied by a zeal that was in reaction. It was just the very beginning of the Counter-Reformation. And they felt that their religion was going to be questioned unless they got souls. They come here and they say, oh my God, 25,000 people are being sacrificed, human sacrifices, on the Great Pyramid.

Peter Robinson: Now this, by the way, this has become a matter that intrudes into political correctness.

Peter Robinson: And Lord knows I'm not an expert on this. But in my little lifetime, we were taught that the Aztecs engaged in widespread human sacrifice. Then we have a revisionist school that says, well, no, wait a minute. The only authority we have on that is the Spanish documents. And they clearly overstated what was taking-- And now it's my understanding that the archaeologists are discovering more and more and more evidence that it was indeed not just occasional human sacrifice, but a regular feature, a daily feature of-- I mean, it's almost as if in the island of Manhattan every single day there were some human sacrifices at the top of the Empire State Building. Is that right?

Victor Davis Hanson: No, it's absent.

Peter Robinson: And you insist on that in this book.

Victor Davis Hanson: You look at contemporary archaeological reports that confirm what Bernal Diaz said or Prescott said in the 19th century great historian. But more importantly, there are pictorial skull racks that can be-- that they have numerical records. And we know that the lake that surrounds-- it's an island civilization, Tenochtitlán, was polluted because of a festival where they may have sacrificed 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 within a four-day period. It was something like Auschwitz. And they threw the bodies into the-- so I don't think anybody-- what they challenge is there are anthropologists that say, well, there was no large herbivores. So there was no source of protein for the sophisticated, systematic, centrally planned economy. And they were very architecturally advanced. And they needed, in this very urban society of a quarter million people. And the Spanish said it was more impressive than Venice. Venice at its height. It had a very sophisticated system of law.

Peter Robinson: But the Spanish are not saying these people are barbarians.

Victor Davis Hanson: No, they're not. They're saying that they are very sophisticated people, which means that we have-- they're even more dangerous because they have spread three or four things that we think are terrible. They're cannibals, and we know that they did eat portions of the sacrificial. They engage in ritual sodomy, which we don't think is permissible. And they sacrifice humans. And so it's our duty as emissaries of Christianity, defined as Catholicism of the Spanish Reconquista period, to kill people to save them. We've got to kill the people who are doing this. And then we're going to surround all of the people around the lake of the empire who resent being harvested. When they lose-- war is not fought to take land. War is fought to get captives, so-called flower wars. So you don't try to kill somebody. You knock them down and tie them up. And you drag them. And then the guy that has the most captives is very famous. And then they're brought up to Tempo Major, and they're sacrificed. And the Spanish find this horrific, but they also discover that it's in their interest, because they're not-- when you get Spanish Toledo steel, male helmet, especially if you're mounted, Toledo blade, arquebus, gunpowder—

Peter Robinson: They can't capture you.

Victor Davis Hanson: And they're trying to capture you. They're not trying to-- if they would just swarm them and cut their throat, they might have won. But they're trying to knock them down and tie. And then the final thing about it is they don't know who Cortez is. He's more gifted than Alexander in some ways. He's more gifted than Mehmet. He's probably more gifted than even Scipio. And nobody knows that he's never had any experience in this. And it turns out he is a natural military genius. And every time they should have been extinguished, they lose, they've got-- they're sick. He comes out.

Peter Robinson: He finds a way out.

Victor Davis Hanson: And he finds a way out. He's a military genius. And he's ruthless. And he—

Peter Robinson: So, Victor, on the Spaniards, wipe out the Aztecs. To what extent-- I'm just trying to think, to what extent is that an annihilation of the kind that takes place in the other examples? We have-- I have a Mexican friend who said, well, just look around Mexico City. You see very few people of Spanish descent and millions of people of Indian or Aztec descent. They didn't destroy them.

Victor Davis Hanson:  Aztec is a key word.

Peter Robinson: Oh, is that so? And then the other thing is there is-- I checked on this. I went online. There is still a duke de Montezuma in Spain today. They took the grandchildren of the last emperor of the Aztecs back to Spain.

Victor Davis Hanson:  They did.

Peter Robinson: And honored them by making-- ennobling them. OK, so what gets destroyed? What is ended?

Victor Davis Hanson:  Nahutul, the language exists in Mexico today. I have been in my hometown where people who have come from Mexico and Spanish speakers cannot understand them. So-- but Aztecs as a city, as a unique culture among indigenous people is destroyed. So when you talk to somebody and you say, well, if somebody says to you, the San Diego Aztecs, they never say to San Diego-- you know, the sports team, college team, they never say to San Diego Tlaxcalans or Toltecs. Why do they not do that?

Peter Robinson: They couldn't spell it apart from anything else.

Victor Davis Hanson:  Because first of all, we have a chronicle of this majestic civilization and how advanced they were, as I said, in architecture, town planning, sanitation, very sophisticated. But they don't want to talk about the downside of cannibalism, human sacrifice. But the point is, if we were transported to 1521, Cortes would have never been able to defeat them without the help of the Tlaxcalans. He had-- and their allies, he must have had at least-- he drew on an army of-- over that two and a half year period of over 200,000. And they probably lost—

Peter Robinson: Because the surrounding tribes are tired of being raided for captives who would be sacrificed.

Victor Davis Hanson: As soon as the word got out that Cortes was back again, that he was not annihilated, he came back. And this time he had brigandines or boats. And he would navigate in a combined amphibious and land attack on the causeways and by land. And he figured out how to beat them. And he gave them an ultimatum that I want to save your city and make it the capital of New Spain. But if you don't, I'm going to destroy it. That word went out. And all of a sudden, these fickle allies that sometimes had helped them, they-- they masked. I said, my God, you're going to destroy—

Peter Robinson: We have a moment here.

Victor Davis Hanson: And I can pay them back for all the things they did. And they ran wild. And in fact, he says in his letters and so does contemporary sources that he regretted that once he unleashed these people, they butchered and butchered and butchered and they destroyed Aztec's central civilization. So yes, there are people who survived the Holocaust, and that's what it was, but centrally planned civilization with a precinct class, an urban center, an-- no, it's now Spain and sp-- the Spanish build on top of it, right on top of Tenochtitlan. They used the very foundations of the destroy-- they destroyed it down to the foundations. It's gone. And there is no formal Aztec culture. There are indigenous people, of course, because they form about 1% of the population in what is Mexico, the Spanish.

Peter Robinson: And you can go to the Socoló in Mexico City today. And on the very side of the Templo Mayor, the great Aztec pyramid is a gigantic Spanish cathedral which says among any-- among other things what it says is, we won, we lost.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. They were-- they were actually given special-- there were concessions given from the Spanish to the Flaxcawans, and they honored them. In other words, that you are not going to be subject to the same degree of subservience, of the scattered remnants of anybody who fought for the Aztecs.

Peter Robinson: I see. Last questions. You've got a number of themes of relevance to us today. One theme here is the capacity of the doomed for self-delusions. The Thebans failed to grasp the military revolution that's taking place under Philip. They failed to grasp, even though they have some intelligence, they have reasons to question their own judgment of Alexander's ability, they say no. The Carthaginians failed to grasp the change in Roman power and determination over two centuries. The Byzantines cannot bring themselves to imagine that a city that has lasted a thousand years could fall, let alone fall in a day. The end of everything, I'm quoting you, the gullibility and indeed ignorance of contemporary leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability of their enemies are not surprising given unchanging human nature. At the beginning of the program, you talked about the plight of the Greeks, you talked about threats against Israel. What are Americans to make of this?

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I think we should take these lessons very seriously, both from the point of the attacker and the attack, because you mentioned some of the commonalities. At the end of the book, I give you a kind of a common denominator blueprint. People who have not been defeated or accustomed to a position of superiority culturally, militarily, they think that they're invulnerable forever and they're not aware of insidious decline. The things that Alexander took is not the themes of the Pamanandas and yet the walls look as stout as they ever were and the people are the same, they think. Same thing with Carthage, the same thing with Constantinople. Nobody's ever, they said nobody's ever going to get through the walls. They tried just early, you know, 50 years early, they couldn't do it. We're invulnerable and people said, "Well, we're not the same people." They don't think that anybody would ever dream of extinguishing them. We've been here a thousand years. We're the children of Oedipus. To note, Shitlan, we've been here, this is the pinnacle of our civilization, etc. Constantinople, this is the city of Constantine and Justinian. We can't fall. So there's an unreality and then they have no idea who they're facing. They have no idea what's in the mind of Cortez. They have no idea.

Peter Robinson: Do we have any idea what's in the mind of Xi Jinping, of Vladimir Putin?

Victor Davis Hanson: We have no idea. We think that he, we think that Xi thinks as I think George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, all bipartisan. They all thought that he is so impressed with Western civilization. He's globalizing, he's changed his economy. Yes, he's rough around their edges but our leisure, our affluence, globalization will acculturate them and China will take their place among the family of nations.

Peter Robinson: Because of course they want to be like us.

Victor Davis Hanson: They don't understand that that is exactly what the Byzantines said about the Ottomans, that's exactly what people said about Alexander, that's exactly what they said about the Carthage. And these people don't understand, so in our, whether it's Putin, so when Putin says I'm going to use nuclear weapons if I lose. And there's been about 17 threats from high members of the Russian military, high members of the Russian parliament such as it is and Putin himself, tactical, nuclear, even. We say this is crazy. They would never do that. We never say, well if I was going to lose and be humiliated or if I wanted Ukraine the breadbasket of the old Soviet Union and ports on the Black Sea and a window right under Europe I'd be willing to do a lot of stuff for it. And I've done, so there's an unreality and then on the part of the attacker they need to understand what the attacker is capable of. I just add one quick thing. I also mentioned the serial threats that China has given Taiwan. And they even made a brief film about nuking Japan if it interfered, called in the war criminal.

Peter Robinson: The Chinese have.

Victor Davis Hanson: Chinese commerce.

Peter Robinson: And they've distributed that in China.

Victor Davis Hanson: And just like Er And just like Er Israel, he said I'm going to do the same thing to the Armenians and he just ethnically cleansed 100,000 of them. I'm going to do the same thing as my grandfathers. They had the solution. So these people are serious when they say this. But I had one line in the epilogue to that effect of what China and that's a very big market, the Chinese market. And I've had a lot of success with other books.

Peter Robinson: Victor, one other of the... But anyway, just to... Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Victor Davis Hanson: I was given notice by the Chinese publisher. I had to take out that line or there would be no book sales and everything would be cancelled, no Chinese translation in the epilogue.

Peter Robinson: So they are serious.

Victor Davis Hanson: So I didn't do it and there's not going to be a book in China. That book will never be in China.

Peter Robinson: Oh, well, all right. Yes. You don't think somebody will... Okay. That's a good conversation. Another of the themes that strikes me here, war changes things. I'm quoting you again, the end of everything. Once Alexander grasped the full extent of Theban hatred, he concluded that only destroying the city rather than merely capturing it would end Greek opposition to Macedonia. Cortes decided there was no way to root out the imperial system without knocking the Aztecs' infrastructure down upon them. Such revised decisions are common throughout military history. Near the end of World War II, US Army Air Corps General Curtis LeMay decided the only way to destroy Japan's dispersed manufacturing, which was deeply embedded within the neighborhoods of Tokyo, was to ignite the city and we get the fire bombing of Tokyo. Again, war changes things. So we are supplying the Ukrainians with weapons and materiel. We have two carrier groups in the Eastern Mediterranean to support the Israelis and we have our forces disposed, our naval forces disposed in the Pacific. We don't know where our attack submarines are because there's no reporting on that and there shouldn't be, but we're concerned about Taiwan. We're very concerned about Taiwan. What are the lessons of the end of everything for Americans as we face trouble, military challenges on three fronts?

Victor Davis Hanson: If we would look at ourselves dispassionately and not say we're Americans, we're always numbered countries. We would say the following. We've never had in terms of the percentage of GDP debt or in actual numbers except for a brief period in World War II, $35 trillion we owe and we are borrowing $1 trillion every hundred days. It's completely unsustainable. We've never had the military admit to us that it is short 40,000 troops and they don't know where to get them at a time when the American population has never been larger. We have ...

Peter Robinson: The Army missed its recruiting goals last year by 10%.

Peter Robinson: And that was not the first year.

Victor Davis Hanson: We have had a porous border. We have never had no border at all. It ceased to exist. We've had 10 million people walk across without audit. We've never seen anything like it. We have the largest number of foreign-born residents, both in numbers, 50 million and in percentages of the resident population, 13. We've ever had at a time when we haven't lost confidence in the melting pot. Okay. We've had high crime areas before, high crime periods. We've never had a period in American history where our elites say that crime is not crime. It's a social construct and you have to let somebody, a violent criminal out the same day that he's arrested. That's a new theory, critical legal theory. Okay. We're a multiracial society and we're the only successful multiracial democracy. We know that it depends on relegating your tribal affiliations to the general idea of being an American. We are regressing into tribalism. So when you look at all of these challenges and you look at the symptoms, we have never done anything like Afghanistan. Just completely flee and leave $50 billion in weaponry to the terrorist organization that's selling all over the globe. Never had that before. We have never had since World War II a Verdun. We have passed the numbers of dead and wounded in Verdun. We're above 700,000 wounded, missing or killed Russians and Ukrainians and we're headed to Somme territory and nobody has any idea how to stop this. Russia is not going to be able to take all of Ukraine and we are not going to be able to get back the Donbass in Crimea. So it's going to continue. Nobody has an answer. Nobody takes serious that the Chinese would be crazy enough to go across the Taiwanese Strait and try to take that city. They say they can do it. So my point is, never have we been faced with such existential challenges in the post-war period. At a period when we are so weak, or at least we're not naturally weak, our constitution is there, our natural resources, we lead the world. But when you look at crime, when you look at debt, when you look at the border, when you look at our universities, which were the envy of the world, they were the engine that drove American culture and power and technology and they're in crisis. Science is in crisis.

Peter Robinson: So we're like the Thebans. We're not the same people.

Victor Davis Hanson: We're not the same people. We're not the same people that maybe we have it in us. We're not the same people who stormed Omaha Beach when the first 2,000 people were mowed down. They just kept coming.

Peter Robinson: Victor, I want to play a brief video excerpt.

Video Excerpt:

-You both work here.

-You're among the intellectuals who are offstage, the members of Congress are on stage, but they're always turning around saying, Blumenthal, did I get that right?

-Bridge, what about this?

-Is this town serious?

-Do you feel a sense of seriousness descending that is adequate to the moment?

-Absolutely not.

-Absolutely.

-We're in a world of warfare and we're not on a war footing.

Peter Robinson: Victor, Washington is, there's no sense of seriousness in Washington.

Victor Davis Hanson: No. We think that the most important thing is counseling student debt or inaugurating new woke programs, but it's going to take us seven years to replace the javelin anti-tank weapons. We're short 155 millimeter. That was our signature. We were the biggest producer of shells in the world.

Peter Robinson: Victor, can I ask one, the book is called The End of Everything and you describe four episodes, all of which take place, the most recent of which takes place about four centuries before the invention of nukes. So let me quote if I may, here's a quotation from Clausewitz, who saw the Napoleonic Wars as a young Prussian officer and meditated on military theory and the rest of his life. Here's Clausewitz. This has always bothered me. “If one side uses force without compunction, that side will force the other to follow suit. Even the most civilized of peoples can be fired with passionate hatred of each other. The thesis must be repeated. War is an act of force and there is no logical limit to the application of that force.” Thebes wiped out. Carthage leveled.

Constantinople civilization blotted out. His text gone. And now we have nuclear weapons.

Victor Davis Hanson: Among other things, we have AI, we have bio weapons apparently, an accidental release from the Wuhan lab.

Peter Robinson: So what I'm desperate to do here is to end on an upbeat if I can find one anywhere. Should we take encouragement from the long period of the Cold War? When we had nuclear weapons but managed to defeat Soviet communism without any use, without warfare, without a major war, without a major confrontation, should we be cheered by that?

Victor Davis Hanson: We should learn—

Peter Robinson: Or are we doomed?

Victor Davis Hanson: No, we're not doomed. We need to learn from wise men like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, even to an extent Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and the rest of them.

Peter Robinson: They all had one thing-- You mentioned Ronald Reagan?

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I'm getting to him.

Peter Robinson: Oh, all right.

Victor Davis Hanson: And in a period of doubt where people had questioned their so-called Neanderthal approach to human nature that they believed that deterrence and not dialogue or the UN kept the peace, along came Ronald Reagan. And he said-- he basically said the degree which we are safe is the degree to which we help our friends and tell our enemies to be careful because we will defend us and we're going to have the capability to do it. Deterrence, deterrence, deterrence, which is just a Latin word to scare somebody off from doing something stupid. And if you don't believe in deterrence, then as Vegeta said, if you want peace, prepare for war. If you want war, prepare for peace.

Peter Robinson: Victor, will you close our conversation by reading a passage from-- Victor Davis Hanson, the author of The End of Everything, reading a passage from The End of Everything.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, thank you. I'm going to give you the degree that I can read well.

“The fate of the Thebans, Carthaginians, Byzantines, and Aztecs remind us that what cannot possibly happen can indeed on occasion occur when war unleashes timeless human passions and escalation rather than reduction in violence becomes a role of conflict.”

“In this regard, we should remind ourselves that we really do not know the boundaries of what may follow from the dispute in the Ukraine or a standoff over Taiwan or strikes on nuclear facilities in Iran.”

“Like their predecessors, modern attackers will on occasions insist on impossible turn.

They will sometimes become further enraged by prolonged and toxic resistance.”

“The targeted will believe that doom resistance may not be so impossible, that their defenses are underestimated while their enemies' powers are exaggerated, and that reason rules war.”

“And so they will hope that even their own defeat cannot possibly entail the end of everything.”

Peter Robinson: Victor Davis Hanson, author of The End of Everything. Thank you.

Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you very much for having me.

Peter Robinson: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution, and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.

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