Dressed to kill: the material ethics of war

Abstract

What do the costumes that soldiers wear have to do with the ethics of war? This article tackles this question. It argues that military uniforms operate as a site and source of ethics of war discourse, reproducing codes of conduct as the dress code. It advances an account of the uniform as a material interface where the ethics shows itself in aesthetic form, and vice versa. It elaborates this position via a case study of the 2018 decision of the Australian Defence Force to respond to the commission of war crimes by its members by tightening uniform regulations – specifically by banning patches that displayed death symbology (e.g. the Grim Reaper logo, Punisher emblem, etc.). While critics and former military personnel have derided this move as superficial, we suggest that it reflects a sophisticated attempt to leverage dress code as a means of reinforcing ethical code. We build on this insight to mount a case for a new approach to the ethics of war. Contemporary ethics of war scholarship focuses predominantly on textual sources, treating them as if they are the only vector of ethical reasoning about war. This overlooks the reality that ethical positions bearing on war are routinely transmitted via a range of non-textual conduits, including material, aesthetic, and ritual practices. The argument, which we develop over the course of this article, is that ethics of war scholars should widen their aperture to account for the full range of forms that ethical claims about the use of force assume.

The history of clothing tells us much about civilisations; it reveals their codes

Roche, 1994: 5.

Introduction

The study of the ethics of war is a growth-field within International Relations (IR) scholarship, yet it appears adrift from recent developments in other areas of the discipline. One area where it appears especially out of step with contemporary IR debates is its almost exclusive reliance on textual sources. Contemporary ethics of war scholarship focuses predominantly on books, articles, and other written materials, treating them as if they are the only vector of ethical reasoning about war. This is to its detriment. It overlooks the reality that ethical positions bearing on war are routinely transmitted via a range of non-textual conduits, including material, aesthetic, and ritual practices. The argument, which we develop over the course of this article, is that ethics of war scholars should widen their aperture to account for the full range of forms – including but not limited to aesthetic, material, and ritual practices – that ethical claims about the use of force regularly assume.

We develop this argument in three stages. The first section establishes the logocentrism of contemporary ethics of war scholarship by way of a brief survey of the field. It proposes that ethics of war scholars might address this bias towards texts by drawing on insights generated by the recent aesthetic, material, and affective turns in IR theory. The second section showcases what this might look like by demonstrating how one mundane but significant aesthetic-material practice, the military uniform, can be analysed as a site and source of ethics of war discourse. This involves elucidating the role the uniform plays as a material interface that translates dress code into ethical code, and vice versa. The final section caps the discussion by examining how these dynamics played out in a recent case, namely, the Australian Defence Force’s attempt to use the uniform to ethically re-wire the Australian armed forces following the discovery that members of its Special Forces had committed war crimes in Afghanistan. This article, then, issues a challenge to scholars to develop a material approach to the ethics of war, one that recognises the role that non-textual sources can play in shaping how we think about the rights and wrongs of war. In doing so, it makes a case for connecting ethics of war scholarship, not just to its traditional domains of Moral Philosophy and the History of Political Thought, but to IR debates that focus on ‘the everyday as a central site of politics’ (Humer, 2025: 2).

Ethical codes

The ethics of war is a niche topic, but also a cornerstone of International Political Theory (Dill, 2018). Chris Brown (2018: 54–55; also: Erskine, 2013: 239) names it as a catalyst for the emergence of normative theorising within International Relations (IR). Dominated by, but not reducible to, just war theory, its core remit is addressing questions of right and wrong as they arise in relation to the use of military force. ¹ In what, if any circumstances, might the recourse to military force be justified? How should the justified use of military force be conducted? And finally, when and on what terms should belligerents seek to terminate a conflict? Alongside these perennial concerns, there has also been an explosion of interest in recent years in an array of emergent ethical issues, including the use of force short of war (Braun, 2023; Brunstetter, 2021), the weaponization of Artificial Intelligence (Erskine, 2024; Renic, 2024), the use of robotics for military purposes (Baker, 2022; Schwarz, 2018); and cyberwarfare (Lucas, 2017; Neilsen, 2023). Taken at face value, then, the academic study of the ethics of war appears in rude health. A closer look, however, reveals certain pathologies. In particular, the field appears unduly narrow in one key regard. It is heavily logocentric and appears to assume that ethical views on the use of military force are formulated and transmitted preponderantly via textual sources. It is inordinately focused on academic articles and monographs, legal frameworks, military manuals, and official statements issued by political and military leaders. ² Yet ethical positions are routinely advanced in a range of non-textual formats, including material, aesthetic, and ritual practices. To omit these forms of exchange from ethics of war scholarship leads, we argue, to a superficial and incomplete field of analysis. Moreover, the forms of exchange it excludes tend to be primarily practitioner-oriented, i.e. addressed to troops on the ground rather than academics and other observers. Our proposal, which we develop over the course of this discussion, is that ethics of war scholars should broaden their analytical scope to encompass the full range of forms that ethical claims about the use of force assume.

Nothing beyond the text

We will begin by establishing the narrowness of the contemporary ethics of war literature. We will do so via a survey of a set of key texts which exemplify the issue at hand, namely the almost exclusive reliance of contemporary ethics of war scholarship on textual sources.

The landmark work in the field is arguably Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (2015). First published in 1977, and subsequently re-issued five times, it has become the touchstone text in both the academic study of the ethics of war and a staple on the curricula of military academies all over the world (Boyle, 1997; Parsons and Wilson, 2020). It has been credited as re-igniting interest in just war theory, not just among IR scholars, but also in policy and military circles (Orend, 2001). It recasts the central tenets of just war theory in a manner compatible with the modern language of human rights. Our focus, however, is not the substance of Walzer’s argument, but the materials from which it is woven. Walzer (2015) frames his approach to ethical theorising as interpretative (p. xxvi-ii). This commits him to taking the norms that we encounter in the world around us as the starting point for his ethical analysis of war. In practical terms, this involves locating, articulating, and refining the normative principles embedded in contemporary efforts to regulate warfare (xxvi). While Walzer advertises his commitment to aligning his account of the ethics of war with how war is experienced by those who practice it and suffer it, his approach is heavily reliant on textual sources. Ideas transmitted via books and other written media are afforded a privileged status in his analysis. He builds his account upon legal frameworks (e.g. the UN Charter and the work of figures such as W. E. Hall and John Westlake), testimonial accounts of combat (e.g. the memoirs of, among others, George Orwell, Emilio Lussu, and Frank Richards), and literary and philosophical texts (Hobbes, Thucydides, and Clausewitz feature prominently). Moreover, his focus is upon what he calls the moral ‘vocabulary’ (xxiii) of the ethics of war, and he devotes a great deal of time and effort to parsing the meaning of different terms (e.g. aggression, pre-emption, etc.). There is no acknowledgement of, let alone engagement with, non-textual modes of ethical exchange. They do not register in his analysis. They are also absent from later works by scholars who have built on Walzer’s analysis (e.g. Bellamy, 2006; Meisels, 2017; Orend, 2013).

Recent years have witnessed Walzer’s account of the ethics of war come under fierce scrutiny. The so-called revisionist school of just war theory, associated with Jeff McMahan (2009), Cecile Fabre (2012), Seth Lazar (2014), Helen Frowe (2014), and David Rodin (2002), rejects key elements of Walzer’s framework. Most notably, it has contested some of the axiomatic claims advanced by Walzer, including the doctrine of the moral equality of combatants and even, in some cases, the principle of non-combatant immunity itself. ³ Despite, or perhaps because of, the discomfiting nature of the arguments it has produced, revisionism has become the predominant approach within contemporary ethics of war scholarship (Dill, 2018). It is interesting, then, to note that it is even less receptive to non-textual sources than Walzer’s approach. Broadly Kantian in style, it is committed to treating the ethics of war as a purely rational domain which is best accessed and engaged via abstract philosophical reasoning (Hutchings, 2018b). There is no scope within this approach for the consideration of non-textual forms of discourse. Scholars who practice the revisionist approach tend to concentrate their analysis primarily on other philosophical and theoretical texts, though there is a corpus which addresses legal frameworks (e.g. Haque, 2017; Rudolphy, 2023) and military codes (Dill, 2014).

The third and final approach to ethics of war scholarship that we must consider is what we might call the historical or traditional approach. This approach, which is closely associated with the work of James Turner Johnson, (1975, 1981), supposes that the task of thinking ethically about war necessarily entails thinking historically about ethics. For Johnson and those who follow his lead (e.g. Glanville et al., 2023; Morkevicius, 2018; O’Driscoll, 2019), this takes the form of an attempt to trace the evolution of just war thinking over time. While these scholars take a great deal of care to situate just war thinking in its social and material context, their inquiries hinge almost exclusively on exegetical analyses of the canonical texts of the just war tradition (e.g. Kalmanovitz, 2020; Reichberg, 2019). There is no serious affordance made for the possibility that ideas bearing on the ethics of force have been, and indeed continue to be, transmitted by means other than texts. ⁴ Bringing all of this together, it is apparent that the ethics of war literature in all its different guises has to date paid scant attention to any mode of ethical exchange beyond the text.

From texts to textiles

The conceit that ethics is a predominantly textual realm is, we contend, unduly restrictive. It focuses attention on one narrow domain of ethical activity, while neglecting all others. This has the effect of skewing the ethics of war literature towards the analysis of academic, legal, and technical texts and away from any interrogation of its more mundane and practical applications. This ignores the fact that the ethical regulation of war is embedded in and reproduced via a wide range of mundane everyday materials, sense-making practices, and routinised processes (Barkawi, 2017: 59). Flags and badges, but also regimental paraphernalia, chants, mess-hall etiquettes, and the artwork hanging in the general’s office can and do function as both sites and sources of ethics of war discourse. Indeed, they are often fundamental to the moral formation, not just of the soldiers exposed to them, but also of the armies that they comprise.

The ethics of war literature may be silent on this front, but the wider discipline of IR has not been. Recent years have witnessed a notable shift towards the incorporation of what Kevin Dunn and Iver Neumann, (2016: 263) have called ‘other social stuff’ into the study of world politics. This has involved a widening of the field to examine the role that material practices such as uniforms, but also tattoos (e.g. Dyvik and Welland, 2018; Palestrino, 2022), museums (e.g. Sylvester, 2019), visual imagery (e.g. Caso, 2017), popular culture (e.g. Crilley, 2021), computer games (e.g. Robinson, 2015), fashion (e.g. Tedesco, 2021), rituals (Mälksoo, 2021), the air we breathe (Brandimarte, 2023), and even cans of soup (Enloe, 2000) play in the governance of contemporary armed conflict. This direction of travel is supported by, and crosscuts, the conceptual and methodological innovations generated by the so-called ‘aesthetic’ (Bleiker, 2001; Moore and Shepherd, 2010), ‘material’ (Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams, 2015; Salter, 2015), and ‘affective’ (Hutchison, 2016; Solomon and Steele, 2017) turns in contemporary IR scholarship. ⁵ It is also consonant with Anders Engberg-Pederson’s work (2023) on ‘martial aesthetics’ and the call for ‘martial empiricism’ advanced by Antoine Bousquet et al. (2020). ⁶ The general effect of these developments has been to open the eyes of IR theorists to the possibility that things other than texts can be implicated in the production and transmission of knowledge, ideas, beliefs, and values (Ansorge and Barkawi, 2014).

Our argument, which we will develop over the remainder of this article, is that ethics of war scholars can learn from these insights from IR theory. They can correct for the unduly narrow constitution of their analytical field by widening their theoretical aperture to incorporate non-textual sources and materials. The second section, to which we now turn, showcases what this might look like by demonstrating how one aesthetic-material practice, the military uniform, which has hitherto been ignored by just war theorists, can be analysed as a vector of ethics of war discourse.

Dress codes

The word ‘uniform’ derives from uni-form, which means ‘one form, all alike’ (Tynan and Godson, 2019: 10). It denotes a form of clothing that indicates membership of a particular institution or organisation and indexes the behaviour of the wearer to the perceived attributes of the wider group (Joseph and Allen, 1972: 720; McVeigh, 1997: 191). Some uniforms are more standardised than others, but even in their more relaxed forms they produce conformity – or what Alison Matthews David (2003: 24) terms a ‘unified visual field’. Defined as Pfanner a national military costume principally fashioned from cloth and codified according to regulations (2004: 93–94), the military uniform is highly formalised. Articulated in regulation dress codes, military uniforms encompass not just the clothes that military personnel must wear, but also how they must wear them. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) Army Dress Manual (2017) is a case in point. In addition to determining what items of apparel ADF members must wear, it offers detailed instructions on matters pertaining to etiquette and carriage. ‘Members wearing the Australian Army uniform’, it states, ‘are not to: purchase or consume alcohol; chew gum, slouch, saunter, place hands in pockets; smoke in the street, jay-walk or loiter; walk/march around while using a mobile phone; undertake any similar deportment which detracts from a military appearance in the eyes of the public’. It also prohibits ‘radical hairstyles’ and tattoos that convey sexist, racist, offensive, intimidating, or hedonistic messages, and imposes restrictions on the wearing of badges and insignia. ⁷ How soldiers style and accessorise their apparel is, it follows, a core element of the military uniform, not ancillary to it. Our focus in this section is to elucidate how military uniforms, thus understood, can be (and have been) leveraged as a site where norms bearing on the ethics of war are produced and transmitted.

Constituting soldiers

The military uniform is fundamental to how warfare is ordered and regulated. It operates as a form of legal material which enables us to delineate, not only between rival belligerents, but also, crucially, between different kinds of actors on the battlefield (Keshavarz and Parsa, 2019: 224–25). It constitutes the soldier qua soldier, thus distinguishing them from non-combatants as well as from brigands, and imbuing them with certain rights and duties under law (Ferrell, 2003; Pfanner, 2004).

The military uniform ‘regiments’ its wearer as a soldier (Wadham, 2013: 224). Put in less archaic terms, it is the device employed by the state to constitute the men and women bearing arms on its behalf as soldiers (Kutz, 2005: 161). It is one of the principal means employed by states to transform civilians into soldiers and certify (and indeed legitimise) their activities as affairs of state (Herron, 2019; McFarlane, 2023: 257). This is what Michel Foucault (1984: 179) was alluding to when he observed that ‘the soldier has become something that can be made . . . one has ‘got rid of the peasant’ and given him the ‘air of the soldier’.‘ To bestow a military uniform upon a member of one’s community is, therefore, to designate them as a certain kind of actor, namely a lawful combatant acting in the service of the state (Guillaume et al., 2018: 159). As already noted, this generates both legal entitlements and liabilities. On the one hand, the mere fact of wearing a military uniform means that a soldier is entitled to the protections afforded to combatants under the law of armed conflict, including prisoner of war status in case of capture and immunity from prosecution for lawful acts they committed as active participants in an armed conflict. On the other, the same mere fact of wearing a military uniform means that a soldier may also be lawfully engaged by enemy combatants. Beyond this, the military uniform commits its wearer to abiding by a certain set of rules, laws, and military codes of conduct (Joseph and Allen, 1972: 722). The uniform thus binds the wearer to the norms that their army professes to observe. ⁸ As such, it acts as both a symbolic marker and a guarantee that the persons wearing it are bound by the laws of war (Guillaume et al., 2015: 56). ⁹

The flipside of this is that anyone not wearing a military uniform will prima facie be classed as a non-combatant and invested with the legal entitlements and liabilities associated with this status. This involves, on the one hand, legal protection from being directly or deliberately targeted by military operations, and, on the other, debarment from active participation in armed hostilities. If, as Toni Erskine (2008: 188) has argued, the principle of non-combatant immunity is ‘a cardinal feature of the ethics of war’, it is salutary to note that it is operationalised via military uniforms. They provide the legal materiality upon which it is predicated and via which it is enacted.

The military uniform does not just constitute its wearers as soldiers, however. It also constitutes them as a very particular form of soldier – one which has historically been highly gendered. ¹⁰ Since their standardisation in the late 17^th century, military uniforms have constituted soldiers in an emphatically masculine form. ¹¹ Uniforms have, over the years, been designed to accentuate the manly attributes of the troops wearing them (Tynan, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012; Tynan and Godson, 2019). Features designed to make the wearer appear taller, broader, more regal, and more muscular should be understood in this light. Constituting its wearer as a ‘man of action’ (McDowell, 1997: 56), the military uniform thus simultaneously reproduces the cultural association between soldiering and masculinity and the traditional gendered division between ‘just warriors’ and ‘beautiful souls’ (Elshtain, 1987: 14–15). The enduring power of these tropes, and the role that military attire plays in constituting them, is attested to by recent feminist work (MacKenzie, 2023) on militarised masculinities and the aesthetic production of the ideal-typical soldier. ¹²

Disciplining armies

John Monash, the outstanding Australian general of the First World War, issued a set of advisory instructions to the officers under his command. Matters of ‘turn-out’ featured prominently in his directives. ‘Cleanliness of person, orderliness in dress and manner, steadiness in the ranks, soldierly bearing, smartness in movement; these qualities must be constantly impressed upon every man until they become habitual (1914)’. What Monash grasped, and what he was seeking to convey to his subordinates, is that the military uniform functions as a disciplinary technology that enables military commanders to exert control over their troops and shape their behaviour. Or, as Jennifer Craik (2003: 131) puts it, the uniform provides militaries with an instrument by which to ‘mould’ the comportment and conduct of its members. IR scholarship frequently alludes to the disciplinary function of the military uniform, but, with only a few exceptions (e.g. Guillaume et al., 2015; Guillaume et al., 2018), has not unpacked the mechanisms by which it operates.

Flirting with tautology, we might say that the defining feature of the uniform is precisely its uniformity. Uniforms suppress expressions of individuality in both appearance and behaviour and impose conformity upon the group-members expected to wear them. When a recruit dons a uniform, he or she sets aside those aspects of his or her identity other than their status as soldiers. This involves surrendering the right to accessorise their clothes or person in ways that proclaim their association with (or support for) social, political, or religious causes and communities (Joseph and Allen 1972: 722). In the absence of such symbolic markers, the soldier’s identity will be increasingly subsumed by, and his or her encounters with other people mediated through, the uniform. ¹³ This entrains the soldier to bracket other affiliations and to think of him or herself as a soldier first and foremost – and to act accordingly. As Anat Rafaeli and Michael Pratt (1993: 45) explain, ‘homogeneity of dress facilitates deindividuation because it helps deemphasize individual difference. When deindividuated, individuals become completely submerged in a group, so that individual identities and preferences are replaced by group goals and values’. The principal effect of this is to boost compliance with group standards of behaviour. The uniform thus operates as a means for exerting control over soldiers and guiding their behaviour so that it conforms to military needs and norms. ‘Internally and for its wearer, the military uniform is part of a disciplinary process of imposing tailored modes of action, manners, and movements that are essential in order to create a professional army out of ordinary civilians (Keshavarz and Parsa, 2019: 231)’.

Uniforms are also used by armed forces to inculcate values in their members. They furnish militaries with a means of control, not only over the social behaviour of soldiers, but also over the formation of their inner selves (Craik, 2005: 3–4; Peoples, 2013). They are a vehicle for orienting soldiers towards certain ways of seeing the world, instilling codes of civility in them, habituating them towards particular values, and constructing a particular persona for them to fulfil (Craik, 2005: 29–30; Stephenson, 2019; Symes and Meadmore, 1996: 176; Wise and Hackett, 2023). Uniforms thus ‘inscribe’ an ethical code on the bodies of those wearing them (Symes and Meadmore, 1996: 173). To once again quote Craik (2003: 128), they are ‘a technique of the body that imprints on [the wearer’s] selfhood’. They serve these functions by cultivating associations between the uniform, the values of the group it represents, and the standards of conduct expected from those wearing it (Peoples, 2011; Rafaeli and Pratt, 1993: 37). ¹⁴

Symbols are key to this process (O’Neill, 1999). Symbols are a means for organisations to invest meaning into their activities and bind their members together under a shared set of identity-based values and behavioural codes (Linklater, 2018: 936). The uniform is both a bearer of symbols (e.g. national crest, unit badge, rank insignia) but also a symbol in its own right. As such, it is implicated in the performance of three interlocking symbolic tasks: it binds its wearers affectively to the military, it impresses group-based values and restraints on them, and it grants them licence to set aside personal or societal beliefs that impede the performance of military duties (Linklater, 2018: 934). It is with this in mind that some scholars have referred to the military uniform as a ‘multi-layered symbolic transmitter’ (Herron, 2019: 26).

The uniform’s potency as a disciplinary device means that it can become a battleground where rival ideas about the values an army stands for and what qualifies as an appropriate military role-identity are given material form and contested. Armed forces periodically update their uniforms to reflect evolving norms and priorities. For example, the US military is currently re-designing its Army uniform to evoke the memory of American victory in the Second World War. ¹⁵ Conversely, there is also a bottom-up practice of military personnel modifying their uniform to serve their personal preferences. This typically involves customising apparel for functionality, style, or to signal group membership. We will have more to say about such cases later – see Section Three. For now, suffice it to say that both top-down and bottom-up efforts to alter military uniforms are prone to rouse controversy. ¹⁶ We might think here of the furore caused by the government-led introduction of camouflage patterning on military uniforms in the late 19th century. A ‘functional response’ to the advent of new military technologies, contemporary commentators nevertheless complained that the adoption of khaki encultured soldiers to seek cover and hide in a cowardly manner rather than stand and fight like men (Guillaume et al., 2015: 64; Tynan, 2012: 81). Practicality ultimately won out in this instance. Latterly, when the ADF received scientific advice that SASR troops deployed to Afghanistan should switch to a mode of desert camouflage which incorporates shades of mauve, it reportedly rejected the proposal on the basis that pink is not a ‘manly’ look for elite Special Forces operators (Phelan, 2017). Scattershot though they may be, these examples reveal the significance of the uniform as a site where the values that a military stands for and the role-identity it assigns to its personnel are both configured and contested.

Representing states

The uniform provides militaries with a platform for presenting a carefully crafted image to the world. It offers armed forces an opportunity to curate a particular look. This matters, as how a military presents itself has implications not only for the morale and self-image of its members, but also for its capacity to recruit new prospects and project an attractive image to a global audience (Bacevich, 2005). Militaries are of course cognisant of this fact. For example, the aforementioned ADF Army Dress Manual (2017) acknowledges that ‘the image, pride, and esteem of the Australian Army are highly dependent upon the maintenance of the highest standards of dress, appearance, grooming, and bearing that is expected of a professional military force’. Uniforms, it follows, play a crucial role in how a state presents its military, and by extension itself, to the world at large. They furnish militaries with a lever to finesse, not just its own image, but also that of the state it serves (Craik and Peirson-Smith, 2022: 115). Balaclavas and full battle rattle or floppy hats and friendly smiles; how an army is attired is an integral part of how militaries and states foster a favourable public image. Military uniforms can, in this sense, be understood as an interface between what Ann Towns (2025: 25) has termed ‘managing appearances’ and ‘representing states’.

States, naturally, have been keen to distance themselves from any unfavourable impressions generated by their military personnel. This can take two forms. The first involves imposing strict protocols on military comportment and sanctioning troops who violate them. The last few years have witnessed a spate of such cases. In 2013, for instance, a member of the French armed forces serving in Mali was photographed wearing a ‘Call of Duty’ skull-bandana over his face. French officials responded angrily to this lapse in discipline: ‘This is unacceptable behaviour. This image is not representative of action by France in Mali (Raftery, 2013)’. Similarly, the United States (US) Marine Sniper Scouts unit found itself embroiled in scandal when a photograph (taken at Camp Pendleton, Afghanistan) emerged in 2012 of its members posing in front of a Nazi SS flag (Associated Press, 2012). The Secretary of Defence and the Commandant of the Marine Corp moved swiftly to distance the US armed forces from the image. In 2009, a group of off-duty Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers were photographed wearing t-shirts emblazoned with visual jokes about killing Arabs. Their actions prompted immediate censure from senior command in the IDF: ‘This type of humour is unbecoming and should be condemned (Associated Press, 2009)’. Russian soldiers have courted opprobrium by adopting Nazi symbols, while members of the Ukrainian army have been censured by their government for wearing Totenkopf (skull and crossbones) badges on their uniforms and performing Nazi salutes (Ponomarenko, 2024).

The second form it can take is to use the uniform to proactively contrive an attractive image for the state. There is an abundance of evidence that the great powers have historically utilised the uniform to project an impression of civility, control, and benevolence (Clifford, 2001; David, 2003; McDowell, 1997; Mansel, 1982; Roche, 1994). In 18^th century Britain and France, for instance, military uniforms made use of tight britches, leather boots, cinched coats, shiny buttons, gold piping, and decorative tassels to convey status, display prowess, and perform cultural superiority. The military uniform operated in these countries as a conduit for a wider set of practices which reproduced imperialism as dress code. The experience of formerly colonised countries presents the flip side of this story. Keen to present their armies as civilised and virtuous, as opposed to primitive and barbaric, many post-colonial states adopted uniforms that emulated the semiotic codes of imperial costume (Abler, 1999; Streicher, 2012). By fashioning their troops in the style of European armies, these states attempted to imbue their armies with the sheen of legitimate statehood. As Ruth Streicher (2012: 475) explains, ‘the military uniform was deployed as a sartorial sign, indicating gentlemanly manners and differentiating civilised statesmen from men of different class’. In Thailand, for instance, the uniform became a credentialing device for distinguishing the national army from a paramilitary faction. It was almost, she concludes (476), as if ‘ideas of propriety and politeness were woven into its fabric’. In other post-colonial countries, however, the process of state-building involved the rejection rather than the adoption of imperial garb. In India, for example, the push for independence was associated with the khadi (Craik, 2005: 42). What Gerrit W. Gong (1984) called the ‘standard of civilization’ evidently had a sartorial front. Uniforms are key, therefore, to the processes via which states represent themselves as legitimate actors. They are one of the crucial instruments at a state’s disposal for presenting itself in an attractive light. To paraphrase Brent Steele (2012: 3), they are a means by which states use ‘aesthetics to be more attractive to others through style’. They are, in this sense, a vital element in the soft power armoury of states. They constitute a form of curated appearance where the ethical shows itself in material-aesthetic form, and vice versa.

Uniforms are not treated in the ethics of war literature. Yet, as we have just seen, they are integrally involved in the production and transmission of ethics of war discourse. Section Three, to which we now turn, fleshes this claim out empirically. It examines how the uniform operated (and was leveraged) as a driver of ethical discourse in the context of a a recent case, namely, the ADF’s attempt to use the power of dress code as a means of tackling some grave disciplinary issues that emerged within its ranks over the course of the Afghanistan War.

Warrior codes

Australia has historically cultivated a stylised image of its armed forces. Charles Bean, the official historian of the Australian forces in World War One, laid the groundwork for this with his portrayal of the Australian soldier, or ‘digger’, in combat (Bean, 2014). Bean’s folksy prose struck an image of the Australian soldier as a quixotic combination of happy-go-lucky farmhand and Homeric hero whose slouch hat reflected his boy-next-door goodness. Irreverent, stout-hearted, relaxed in bearing, but physically imposing, the picture of the digger that came to be celebrated in Australian lore was an attractive amalgam of warrior, protector, and larrikin (Thomson, 1989: 467). That this image bore only a passing resemblance to reality (Gammage, 1974) is telling. The rose-tinted representation of Australian military culture that it offers is not an accident, but is, in fact, carefully tended. The ADF works diligently to curate its brand-identity (Anderson, 2015). This is all part of the ADF’s need to sell a particular image of itself – to its own personnel, the Australian public, and to the world at large. The discovery at the tail-end of the Afghanistan War that Australian troops were culpable of heinous war crimes came, then, as a grave blow. The ADF’s initial response to these revelations involved tightening uniform regulations. While some critics dismissed this response as performative, we argue it is better understood as a sophisticated attempt to leverage dress code to restore ethical code.

Disgracing the uniform

In March 2016, Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell, who was then Chief of Army for the ADF, requested the Inspector-General of the ADF (IGADF) to investigate rumours of serious misconduct by Australia’s Special Forces in Afghanistan. A 465-page report arising from the Inspector-General’s inquiry was published in November 2020 (Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF), 2020). Alongside a range of lesser war crimes, it details 23 incidents in which 39 individuals were unlawfully killed by members of the Special Operations Task Group. These cases did not take place in the heat of battle. Rather, they involved the deliberate, cold-blooded killing of detainees. In some cases, junior soldiers who had yet to register a kill were directed by their patrol leaders to summarily execute a prisoner in their custody – a practice which came to be known as ‘blooding’. These killings were preponderantly committed by members of the Special Armed Services Regiment (SASR) and have caused severe reputational damage for that unit, for the ADF, and for Australia as a nation. Lieutenant-General Campbell referred to the crimes detailed in the Report as ‘shameful’, while its author, Major-General Paul Brereton labelled them ‘disgraceful and a profound betrayal’ of everything the ADF stands for (Knaus, 2020).

The IGADF Report cited the emergence of a warrior military role-identity within the ranks of the SASR as one of the prime contributing factors for these crimes. ¹⁷ Commanders, it states, allowed a ‘warrior culture’ to take root among their troops (IGADF, 2020: 33, 115, 472). This engendered an environment in which killing was celebrated and restraint devalued (IGADF, 2020: 330; 334; 499). ¹⁸ A dismissive attitude towards regulation dress code was found to have played a part in allowing this problematic warrior culture to take root. The cultivation of a toxic and hyper-violent group identity was fostered and reinforced by the militaristic motifs and death iconography that members of the SASR adopted as their unofficial personal or unit logos. The Punisher symbol was especially popular among SASR operators, who stencilled it onto their attire. Other units sported patches designating themselves members of the ‘Taliban Hunting Club’ (Davis, 2022). Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith, an alleged perpetrator of war crimes, is reported to have a tattoo of a Spartan warrior on his chest. Nicknamed Leonidas by SASR colleagues, Roberts-Smith was also photographed on duty wearing a crusader cross badge on his uniform (McKenzie, 2023; McKenzie and Masters, 2018). ¹⁹

The IGADF also charged that a perception of elitism among Australian special forces had cultivated a culture of impunity within SASR. It reported (2020: 325) that SASR members believed that their status as ‘special’ forces ‘justified exceptionalism from ordinary rules and oversight’. It contended that the conditions for this institutional ethical failure were set by matters as seemingly trivial as personal grooming. Members of the SASR have historically been permitted greater leeway with respect to facial hair than regular troops. The Report suggests, however, that some recruits mistook this relaxed approach to personal presentation as licence for adopting a laissez-faire approach to rules more generally (Daley, 2020). They increasingly came not just to style themselves as ‘bearded devils’, but also to act as such (Masters, 2017: 143). The implication was that the SASR’s failure to enforce grooming standards had contributed to a belief within the unit that they were above the law. In sum, the IGADF Report contended that deviation from the standard dress code played a part in generating a culture conducive to the commission of war crimes by Australian troops in Afghanistan.

Re-fashioning the ADF

If uniforms were part of the problem, they might also be part of the solution. Between the commissioning of the IGADF Report in 2016 and its publication in 2020, Lieutenant-General Campbell introduced measures to address the issues it brought to light. Specifically, he implemented new dress regulations as a means of tackling the warrior culture that had taken root in the SASR. This took the form of a ban on badges which displayed death-related or militarist imagery (e.g. Jolly Roger, Punisher, and Grim Reaper emblems). While it is tempting to dismiss this response as cosmetic, it might better be understood as mobilising dress code to re-establish ethical code. As Campbell explained in a 2018 memo circulated to the forces:

On visits across Army and our deployed forces, I have occasionally come across the use, display, or adoption of symbols, emblems, and iconography at odds with Army’s values and the ethical force we seek to build and sustain. While sometimes formal, more often these are informal patches, badges, or symbols, on display by force elements ranging from section to unit level. I refer in particular to the use of what could be termed ‘death’ symbology/iconography: for example, the pirate Skull and Crossbones (maritime outlaws and murderers), the Phantom or Punisher symbols (vigilantes), Spartans (extreme militarism), or the Grim Reaper (bringer of death). Such symbology is never presented as ill-intentioned and plays to much of modern popular culture, but it is always ill-considered and implicitly encourages the inculcation of an arrogant hubris and general disregard for the most serious responsibility of our profession: the legitimate and discriminate taking of life. This is not where we need to be as a national institution. As soldiers our purpose is to serve the state, employing violence with humility always and compassion wherever possible. The symbology to which I refer erodes this ethos of service. I ask that you take immediate action to explain and remove such symbology/iconography in any and all formal or informal use within our army (Campbell quoted in: Hartigan, 2018).

The move to ban these insignia attracted sharp criticism from some quarters. Conservative commentators viewed the ban as a betrayal of military traditions, the infiltration of ‘woke’ culture into the army, and the corrosion of ADF morale and combat-readiness (Devine, 2018; Hartigan, 2018; Huggett, 2018). Others were supportive of the ban. Michelle Grattan (2018) and C. August Elliott (2018), for example, argued that the prevalence of death iconography among ADF troops could be construed as signalling, not only heightened militarism, but a cavalier attitude to the taking of human life. Elliott endorsed the ban on the basis that the wearing of such symbols is what separates a death cult from an army and is contrary to the culture of professionalism that the ADF is striving to develop. For Grattan, they are simply not conducive to putting soldiers in the right frame of mind for the tasks they are asked to carry out.

An ADF report produced in May 2022 frames Lieutenant-General Campbell’s introduction of tighter dress regulations as part of a careful effort to re-fashion the Australian military as an ethical actor. Authored by Richard Davis (2022) of the Centre for Defence and Leadership Ethics (CDLE) at Campbell’s behest, it elaborates the rationale informing the 2018 ban on death iconography. ²⁰ The report opens with an acknowledgement of both the importance that military personnel attach to unofficial symbols and the positive role they can play in respect of generating group identity and purpose. In addition to transmitting values and norms, they imbue them with affective resonance. The report singles out the practice of pinning emu feathers to slouch hats as a case in point. This practice originated organically among the troops, but its romantic connotations were appreciated by ADF leadership, and it was officially incorporated into dress regulations in 2000. The report approves of this move on the basis that emu feathers are compatible with ADF values. By contrast, it recommends that there should be no place in the ADF for militarist or death-related badges. Such symbols, it argues (Davis 2022: 4), ‘contravene’ the values for which the ADF stands. ADF members cannot use symbols that abandon ‘discrimination, proportionality, and self-restraint without risking the moral authority of the ADF’ (Davis 2022: 5). The report proffers three arguments in support of this verdict. First, the use of death symbology roots the ADF’s image in the activity of killing, with no reference to its broader cause or the norms that bind it. Not only is this at odds with how the ADF understands its mission, it also devalues moral constraints on the use of force and dehumanises the ADF’s adversaries. Second, the use of death symbology undercuts the ‘moral authority’ of the ADF (Davis 2022: 2), supplanting it with a vigilante ethos. Akin to a form of ‘visual terrorism’, it ‘takes the ‘just’ out of just war’ by alienating soldiers from the moral content of their actions (Davis 2022: 3). Finally, the use of death symbology encourages ‘normalised deviance’ (Davis 2022). It entrains soldiers to identify with renegades who deploy violence unchecked by the law. The values represented by these figures are contrary to those enshrined in the ADF’s military ethics doctrine. The report concludes that ADF members should be permitted to cultivate group symbols, but only so long as the symbols in question serve a positive purpose and do not undermine ADF values or image. Here, then, is evidence that military actors are cognisant of, and willing to leverage, the role that uniforms can play in priming ethics of war discourse.

Fabricating ethics

Returning to the categories introduced in second section, the ADF ban on death symbology offers us an empirical example of how uniforms can be (and indeed are) employed to constitute soldiers qua soldiers, fashion militaries as ethical actors, and present states in an attractive light.

Uniforms, as we have discussed, constitute the people wearing them as lawful combatants. Armies tailor their uniform to mould their soldiers into a particular image, whether this be as a fearsome warrior or a benevolent protector. ²¹ The ban on death symbology must be read in this light. It reflects an attempt on the part of the ADF to deny its members the opportunity to dress up as, and therefore think of themselves as, the modern descendants of the warrior heroes of yore. The ‘warrior code’ that members of the SASR reportedly espoused through their words and deeds, but especially via their modified uniforms, expresses a macho but also romantic vision of soldiering, one which valorises the pursuit of honour and glory through prowess in combat (Coker, 2007; French, 2005; Ignatieff, 1999: 116–17; Renic, 2020: 59). As such, it runs counter to the role-identity that the ADF seeks to project onto (and inculcate in) its personnel. By imposing a ban on death and militarist iconography, the ADF sought to undercut the attraction of warrior culture by creating a link in soldiers’ minds between the symbols that represent it and criminal behaviour (see: Posner, 1998: 778). By proscribing the display of any imagery associated with it, the ADF was attempting to stigmatise warrior culture in order to prevent it from further metastasizing among the rank and file. It, in effect, leveraged dress code to delegitimise the warrior code among its membership. ²²

The ban on death symbology also reflects an attempt on the part of senior commanders to re-fashion the ADF as an ethical actor. The focus here was not merely the role-identity of individual soldiers, but the normative culture and indeed image of the ADF writ large. The uniform was the vehicle for achieving change in this domain. By banning death-related symbols and leveraging the moral authority of the standard issue regulation uniform, the ADF sought to signal its enduring commitment to the values of restraint and professionalism that are enshrined in its military ethics doctrine (ADF 2024a; ADF 2024b). The decision to ban some symbols (e.g. Punisher, Spartan) but not others (e.g. emu feathers) must, it follows, be understood as an attempt to craft a visual identity that is consistent with the ADF’s stated values of service, courage, respect, integrity, and excellence (ADF, 2024a). It is interesting to note, then, that there is confusion among ADF personnel regarding the rationale behind the ADF’s decision to proscribe badges that do not have exclusively ignoble connotations. The CDLE report (Davis, 2022: 5) quotes an ADF leader: ‘The hierarchy really need to define what is in and what is out. I understand Grim Reaper, Skull and Crossbones, and Punisher. What about Batman, Superman, or Ironman? The Phantom is listed but his character protects the weak’. This taps into the deeper concern that the ADF is seeking to disguise its military function (which ultimately hinges on killing people and breaking things) behind a pristine costume. ²³ The challenge arising from these concerns for the ADF is how to leverage dress code to delegitimise the warrior code without also delegitimising its own core military business. This is just war theory in sartorial mode.

Finally, the ADF ban on death and militarist symbology affords us an opportunity to observe how militaries leverage uniforms to present the states they serve in a positive light. We might think of this under the rubric of what Erving Goffman (1956) called ‘impression management’ (p. 132). Part of the rationale for instituting the ban was the concern that images of ADF troops wearing patches that cast them as violent warriors would jeopardise Australia’s reputation as a law-abiding member of international society. Even if the role of the troops in question involved the use of lethal force, as it often did, they should not be seen to be celebrating this fact. The ADF’s involvement in the delivery of lethal violence should be discretely screened from public view, senior commanders apparently believed, not advertised as a matter of pride. The wearing of badges which valorised killing risked creating an impression of the ADF as a rogue force and detracting from its ability to represent Australia as an ethical actor. By banning these badges, then, the ADF sought, not only to restore the separation between the backstage and frontstage of its military operations, but also to demonstrably reaffirm Australia’s commitment to the values distilled in just war theory. ²⁴

Conclusion

‘The uniform is not just a collection of clothing items’, writes Anneke van Mosseveld (2018: 10), ‘it is the face of the Australian military’. It seems fitting, then, that the material artefact that has come to symbolise ADF war crimes in Afghanistan is the military uniform of Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith. Prior to allegations of war crimes emerging, Roberts-Smith’s uniform was displayed alongside his Victoria Cross medal in the Hall of Valour at the Australian National War Memorial. Tailored to his outsized 6’6” frame, it was once viewed as a material signifier of Australian military virtue. Today it is accompanied by a plaque acknowledging that Roberts-Smith was found by a federal court to be ‘involved and complicit in unlawful killings in Afghanistan’. Its continuing presence in the War Memorial offers a physical reminder of an episode that many Australians have come to view as among the shameful in their country’s history.

It should also alert ethics of war scholars to the fact that, when it comes to war, texts are not the only vectors of ethical discourse. Ethical positions bearing on war are routinely transmitted via a range of non-textual conduits, including material, aesthetic, and ritual practices, such as the military uniform. The ethical regulation of war is embedded in and reproduced via a wide range of everyday materials, sites, and practices. Uniforms, but also the rituals that govern the handling of Regimental Colours, the banners displayed around military bases, the artwork hanging in the Officer’s Mess, and even the interior design of barracks can and do function as both sites and sources of ethics of war discourse. This article, then, invites ethics of war scholars to look beyond texts to textiles and to incorporate what some theorists have termed ‘utile forms’ (Ansorge and Barkawi, 2016) and others have simply called ‘social stuff’ (Dunn and Neumann, 2016: 263) into an expanded field of analysis.

There are significant benefits to be gained from taking this leap. Encouraging ethics of war scholars to consider non-textual conduits of moral discourse would open the field up to cutting edge debates in contemporary IR theory, especially those pertaining to the material, aesthetic, and ritual domains of world politics. This has the potential to enliven a field which has traditionally been closely associated with the esoteric concerns of Moral Philosophy, Analytical Political Theory, and the History of Political Thought. Specifically, it would bring ethics of war scholarship into contact with those more sociological modes of inquiry which centre the mundane and the everyday as sites of interest. This has the potential to help us better understand how just war theory gets up and walks, not just on the battlefield, but in the barracks and on the training ground.