United States Professional Military Education (US PME) has commonly been blamed for training some of the worst abusers of human rights — Latin American dictators and thugs like Argentina’s Leopoldo Galtieri and Panama’s Manuel Noriega, Timorese counterinsurgents, and even some officers who would eventually serve the Taliban in Afghanistan. We test this conventional wisdom using both large-N analyses and case studies of Argentina, Greece, and Taiwan. Our large-N results suggest that US PME trained foreign officers prove to be an important stabilizing force during times of democratic transition. Our case studies uncover very few cases of US PME officers linked to human rights abuses; interestingly, in each of our cases, the US PME trained officers provided the initial infrastructure needed to begin domestic military education programs that encouraged civilian control of the military in emerging democracies.

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To ensure moral targeting decisions, national political leaders must accept the costs of monitoring in terms of time and money, and provide detailed direction, as well as oversight to ensure objectives are clear and subordinates carry out directions. Military officers must ensure that their motivations align with those of their principals, and they must ensure that constraining doctrine for planning and executing operations is followed. The process of aligning motivations with respect to desired outcomes, and the process of planning strategies according to doctrine together lead to moral targeting decisions. By following the processes of getting war plans approved according to published US doctrine, a deliberate dialogue is followed with direction and feedback through several steps of planning and approval that result in multiple people working on a product that results in a sort of corporate 'buy-in'. Through case studies of Desert Storm (the first Gulf War), Operation Allied Force (NATO's war against Serbia), and the US War on Terror (Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns), I find that only in the War on Terror were moral targeting decisions made. Furthermore, they were the only case studies wherein both constraining doctrine was present and principal-agent motivations were aligned with respect to objectives.

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