Forthcoming in George R. Lucas, Jr. (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics (Routledge). Draft only – please do not cite without permission 1 Military Culture and War Crimes ∗ Jessica Wolfendale West Virginia University The problem of understanding why war crimes continue to occur and how they might be prevented has long seemed intractable. 1 With the development of the field of social psychology over the last 60 years and the resulting debates about the relationship between character, situational influences, and human behavior, a number of theories about why war crimes occur have emerged, along with proposals as to how such crimes might be prevented in the future. In this chapter I discuss a number of recent approaches to war crimes in the field of military ethics, and argue that these approaches are based on fundamental misunderstandings about the causes of war crimes and how they might be prevented. Many of the most common views on war crimes fail to recognize the role that military culture and training play in cultivating the moral framework within which war crimes can come to be seen as not just permissible, but in fact required by military virtues such as duty and honor. Thus approaches to war crimes that emphasize additional character development training, ethics classes, or training in moral deliberation miss the mark because they fail to address the fact that war crimes occur in a context in which such crimes are given meaning by both individual perpetrators and by the social and cultural frameworks within which perpetrators act. In this chapter I will propose an account of war crimes that draws on work in social psychology, anthropology, and moral psychology to elucidate the links between the commission of war crimes, the social-