Should U.S. political decision-makers decide to wage a moral war, it is not as easy a merely saying go do it. To ensure moral targeting decisions, American national political leaders must suffer the costs of monitoring in terms of time and money, and provide not only detailed direction, but also constant 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 combat operations is followed. Having satisfied these variables, moral targeting decisions, wherein proportionality of non-combatant casualties is weighed against target necessity, should then be easily attainable. 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 U.S. 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. I posit that it is difficult to follow this process and end up with targeting decisions that do not weigh harm to non-combatants against the necessity of individual targets, especially when principals and agents come together to deliberately ensure they align their motivations with respect to objectives. This theory is applicable to U.S. involvement in war, but is not necessarily generalizable to other countries. Through case studies of American involvement in Desert Storm (the first Gulf War), Operation Allied Force (NATOs air war over Serbia), and the U.S. War on Terror (campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq), I find that only in the War on Terror were moral targeting decisions consistently made by US national leaders. Furthermore, that was the only case study wherein both constraining doctrine was present and principal-agent motivations were aligned with respect to objectives. The other two cases showed that the variables were not followed and proportionality- necessity decisions were not made.

Currently, the high level of burnout among military psychologists resulting from contemporary military service is gaining attention. However, there is insufficient knowledge of their lived experiences of burnout. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore burnout, based on the military occupational mental health, military job demand-resources models, and biopsychosocial models. Eleven active duty and prior service military psychologists were recruited for interviews using snowball sampling. The first phase of data analysis employed NVivo software. The second and third phase used the 7-step modified version of the Van Kamm method, resulting in 7 themes and 1 discrepant case. The key findings indicated that the unique nature of military bureaucracy provided the environment that fostered burnout into a taboo milestone. Furthermore, the challenging task associated with finding meaning and balance for the ambiguous role of being a military psychologist also compounded the experiential factors contributing to burnout. Several shared experiential indications foretelling of burnout were identified. However, the reality of how military psychologist experienced burnout differed from textbook knowledge, indicating there is a theory-practice gap in personally diagnosing burnout progression. Military psychologists also indicated the theory-practice gap between the available resources for burnout and their limiting utilization practicability. The results of this study can be used to make a positive social change by better informing the development of prevention strategies benefiting not only military psychologists but potentially all military members who routinely describe themselves as burned out.