Elise Annett

Professional Military Education (PME) has long been anchored in the canonical insights of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, foundational thinkers whose frameworks continue to inform an understanding of strategy and operational engagement. While PME curricula focus upon strategy, operations, and the professional formation of military leaders, today’s operational environment is increasingly characterized by pervasive technologies, algorithmically driven decision architectures, and rapidly shifting sociocultural dynamics. These realities place new demands on PME institutions charged not merely with imparting knowledge, but with shaping character and identity. Thus, PME must expand its intellectual aperture to integrate these emerging dimensions if it is to prepare leaders for the complex, multidomain competitions that now define contemporary conflict. The question is no longer solely how wars are fought, but who the warfighter becomes in the act and process of warfighting. We contend that Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote offers a profound and unconventional lens for PME pedagogy and leader development, particularly when regarded as a meditation on identity, virtue, and the tension between ideals and lived realities. Approached as a formative text rather than a literary curiosity, the novel invites sustained reflection on how leaders reconcile aspirational principles with the practical demands of experience. Quixote’s unwavering commitment to a chivalric code, even amid absurdity, illuminates the enduring struggle to preserve moral integrity and a coherent sense of virtue in a world that challenges both. His journey invites reflection on the existential dimensions of military life: the interplay of honor, duty, and humanity within environments increasingly mediated by technology and ambiguity. We propose a conceptual pedagogical framework that situates Cervantes alongside Clausewitz and Sun Tzu within PME. Rather than asserting demonstrated educational outcomes, we posit that Don Quixote provides a literary and philosophical lens through which military professionals can examine warfighter identity, virtue, moral imagination, and practical judgment. Such an approach reinforces military education’s core mission of inculcating a sense of professional “becoming”, forming leaders capable of navigating complexity with ethical clarity, and sustaining a warrior ethos as a lived identity rather than abstraction. In this way, the study of Don Quixote becomes an instrument for philosophical inquiry and practical wisdom, fortifying those who serve to act with virtue and vision amid the shifting realities of modern conflict.

Military identity emerges through the lived, imaginative, and moral experience of service. This paper introduces enchantment—the cognitive, narrative, and symbolic structuring of meaning—as a foundational dimension of military life that sustains commitment, moral coherence, and disciplined action under conditions of risk, ambiguity, and existential strain. We propose the “arc of enchantment”, a phenomenologically grounded trajectory encompassing initial enchantment, disruption, disenchantment, reflective integration, and re-enchantment. Disenchantment is not failure, but a predictable encounter with operational and moral reality that can destabilize identity or, when supported by reflection and institutional guidance, deepen ethical and professional resilience. Enchantment functions as cognitive and moral armor, enabling agency, judgment, and ethical integrity where analytic rationality alone is insufficient. Military institutions have an ethical responsibility to cultivate and sustain these dimensions, ensuring warriors can inhabit ideals with disciplined judgment, ethical clarity, and resilient moral agency.

Current joint warfighters are no longer merely trained – in many ways, they are increasingly bioengineered. Within the contemporary warfighting paradigms, the body becomes a domain of technological inscription, where interventions collapse the boundary between therapy and enhancement, transforming organic bodies into operational platforms fortified for tactical efficiency and strategic imperatives. This transformation is not neutral; it is intentional, and thus, the warfighter becomes a node in a cybernetic network whereby the enhanced warfighter is not just more capable, but more compliant, less interruptible, and increasingly interwoven with the ethics of technology. In this light, we propose a framework for military neuroethics that is attuned to the ontological realities and relational consequences of bioenhancement. It acknowledges the ideology of optimization and remains attentive to the contingencies of human involvement in the exigencies of warfighting. Cognizant of a future of conflict that is increasingly automated, it asserts that the human, while biotechnologically altered, is not obsolete; and with this recognition, this article addresses both the need for tactical advantage and the strategic imperatives for the human remaining in command and control.

Biotechnological enhancements for military personnel arouse scrutiny, beyond the ethics of experimental research and due care during operational service, to the eventual return to a civilian life. Reversal of enhancements—by withdrawal, extraction, deactivation, modification, destruction, etc.—will be just as experimental and consequential. Super soldiering may not smoothly transition to ordinary habilitation and lifestyle. Complete reversions of dramatic augmentations, such as prosthetics or brain-computer interfacing, could be more damaging to the person than the initial installation. Partial reversions would be just as perplexing, as discharged personnel retain workable technology to prevent disability while other careers next beckon for a suitably empowered individual. Either way, all such biotechnological enhancements must be treated as ethical and social experiments having both positive and negative potential outcomes. Life stages of technologically modified military personnel require special ethical consideration beyond the lifecycle of the technology itself. The post-enhancement veteran is a largely unexplored area, and we propose that these civilian “supra-soldiers” will become a cohort of increasing interest, requiring continued care and ethical support. To that end, we suggest a system of guidelines to ensure ethically sound support for those who serve, and have served, in national defense.

The accelerating development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems necessitate a critical examination of the boundaries between computation, cognition, and consciousness. This essay contends that as AI increasingly emulates tasks of human judgment, abstraction, and decision-making, it challenges foundational conceptions of mind, agency, and moral responsibility. We employ a philosophically grounded analysis—drawing upon the Cartesian cogito and extended through contemporary cognitive science—to interrogate whether AI manifests cognition or merely its simulacrum. Crucially, we assert that cognition is not reducible to information processing, but entails recursive self-awareness, referential subjectivity, and ethical intentionality. These capacities—essential to moral agency—remain absent in current AI architectures. Nowhere are the stakes of this distinction more pronounced than in military contexts, where iteratively autonomous systems are tasked with operational decisions involving the use of force. The convergence of efficiency with moral detachment in these domains risks displacing reflective human agency with mechanistic execution. We argue that without demonstrable self-reflective awareness, AI cannot satisfy the existential or ethical conditions for true agency. Thus, its role must remain constrained to that of a tool—however sophisticated, governed by human oversight and accountability. The specter of AI is not that it resembles us, but that it may be mistaken for us. To navigate this frontier, we call for a multidisciplinary reckoning that integrates neuroethical inquiry, systems engineering, military doctrine, and philosophical rigor. Herein, before we cede judgment to machines, we must be clear on what it means to judge—and who, or what, is truly capable of doing so.