Hired Guns and Moral Torpedoes: Balancing the Competing Moral Duties of the Public Relations Professional

Public relations helps an organisation and its publics adapt mutually to each other. However, this does not mean that the profession is value neutral or anything goes. There will be cases where professionals have to make discretionary ethical decisions and negotiate their roles and responsibilities, especially when faced with novel or difficult issues. In this conceptual paper, we describe how the notion of professional role morality not only shapes the individual struggles that practitioners endure but also highlights the organisational structures that foster or shun ethics in the decision-making process. Thus we provide a means of assessing professional action that balances the urge to become a hired gun who simply abdicates personal responsibility and completely adopts the employer’s moral viewpoint on the one hand, and moral torpedoes who rely exclusively on their personal views without any concern for wider implications on the other. Investigating role morality as played out in public relations is important because it may explain why practitioners often find themselves at odds with their best moral judgments. Here we present five fictionalised narratives to illustrate the conceptual issues and highlight the most significant moral distinctions that have practical consequences for both the theory and practice of public relations

Masters of the Channel Night: The 10th Destroyer Flotilla’s Victory Off Ile De Batz, 9 June 1944

It was a dark and somewhat stormy night. In the western English Channel, off the Ile de Batz, twelve destroyers, eight Allied (including two Canadian) and four German, hurtled towards each other at a combined speed of 47 knots. Radar, penetrating the black murk ahead of the Allied ships, detected hostile contacts at ten miles range and the force deployed for action. Minutes later they opened devastating fire upon a startled enemy. The battle that ensued on the night of 9 June 1944 was the raison d’etre of the 10th Destroyer Flotilla, a destroyer strike force based on Plymouth. When planning the Normandy invasion Allied naval commanders recognized that although Kriegsmarine surface forces represented only a limited threat to the beachhead, powerful destroyers based in Bay of Biscay ports could wreak havoc on vulnerable build-up convoys crossing the Channel. But, because of the dominance of Allied air power, enemy destroyers came out only in the hours of darkness. Therefore, to win control of the western Channel, the 10th DF had to master the difficult art of night fighting

Confronting Technological and Tactical Change: Allied Anti-Submarine Warfare in the Last Year of the Battle for the Atlantic

The recall of German U-boat wolfpacks from the central north Atlantic at the end of May 1943 ended the most costly phase of the shipping war for the Allies. Never again would the German U-boats inflict dangerously high shipping losses. The naval war remained bitter, nonetheless, for the U-boats refused to give up, turning instead to new technology and new tactics. Right to the end, they continued to present a plausible threat that caused concern in high Allied circles. Indeed, in January 1945 the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty was moved to warn that, “The high shipping losses which may occur during the first half of 1945 may well prejudice the maintenance of our forces in Europe....” The ensuing struggle in early 1945 led to a confrontation and tactical changes by the U-boats countered by operational and tactical adaptation produced in reply by Allied anti-submarine warfare (ASW) forces. This last phase of the battle of the Atlantic was fought out for the most part in the confusing and difficult shallow waters around the coasts of the United Kingdom and off the east coast of Canada, moving to the shores of the United States only in the last few months of the war. This campaign provides insights into how new and unexpected initiatives by an enemy could be dealt with even when no technological solutions were readily at hand. It also illustrates the difficulty that both submarine and antisubmarine forces encounter when operating in the challenging environment of shallow water

Torpedoes in Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, essential tremor, and control brains

Purkinje cell axonal swellings ("torpedoes"), described in several cerebellar disorders as well as essential tremor (ET), have not been quantified in common neurodegenerative conditions

Perception is Everything: Repairing the Image of American Drone Warfare

This thesis will trace the United States’ development of unmanned warfare from its initial use in the World Wars through the Cold War to its final maturation in the War on Terror. The examination will provide a summary of unmanned warfare’s history, its gradual adoption, and concerns regarding the proliferation of drones use to understand the emphasis on unmanned weapons in the American Military. In each phase of development, a single program will be focused on to highlight special areas of interest in the modern day. Finally, the modern era of unmanned systems will focus on the growing integration of new weapon systems which no longer fulfill niche roles in the armory but act as fully vetted frontline combatants. Brought together, this examination will show drones have earned their place as integral tools in the American military inventory as faithful defenders of democracy

“One More for Luck”: The Destruction of U971 by HMCS Haida and HMS Eskimo, 24 June 1944

On the evening of 23 June 1944, HMCS Haida and HMS Eskimo set out from Plymouth, operational base of the 10th Destroyer Flotilla (10th DF), to conduct a sweep of the Western Approaches to the English Channel. Their role was to assist in securing these waters for the ongoing delivery of supplies and reinforcements to the Normandy bridgehead. Across the Channel to the southest, American, British and Canadian forces were now in their third week of fighting across the fields and hedgerows of Normandy. Operation OVERLORD had been the largest amphibious invasion in history and, dependent as it was on the unimpeded use of the sea, required an intensive concentration of air and naval forces to protect Allied supply convoys. This naval counterpart of OVERLORD was Operation NEPTUNE, and it was as part of this massive undertaken that Haida and Eskimo now steamed out of Plymouth

Naval History by Conspiracy Theory: The British Admiralty before the First World War and the Methodology of Revisionism

Revisionist interpretations of British naval policy in the Fisher era claim that an elaborate smoke screen was created to hide the Royal Navy’s real policies; while documents showing the true goals were systematically destroyed. By asserting this, revisionists are able to dismiss those parts of the documentary record that contradict their theories, while simultaneously excusing the lack of evidence for their theories by claiming it has been destroyed. This article shows that this methodology is misleading and untenable