Are Situational Ethics ever warranted for Officers or NCO?

CPT Jack Durish - this is a prime example of abdicating ethics and morality. I have struggled to understand how this could have occurred in a civilized society. I have read the books, discussed this with German Officers at NATO and in the United States as well as my College Professors with no real answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen

The thing is, whatever options you choose in war are opened for use by the enemy. For instance, in a senate discussion (hearing?) about whether President Bush authorized waterboarding one congressman stated that if we did it to their boys they could do it to our sons and daughters.

Keep loyal to your men; remember Nichilo Machiavelli was killed by the state

PO2 (Join to see) - "If we do it, they can do it" is not and never was the prime motivator behind humane treatment of prisoners. When have we engaged in warfare against an enemy that followed the laws of land warfare as they pertain to POW's?

Remember when ISIS burned the Jordanian pilot in a cage. Who would be taken alive by ISIS? How many of the bastards would you take with you to hell before you surrendered. We treat prisoners well to preserve the lives of our men and women who are capturing prisoners instead of getting killed by combatants that would rather die than surrender.

That's what we call an ethical dilemma. Whenever either of two choices has some negative consequences, it creates an ethical dilemma for us. We have to make a decision based on either criteria we've thought about before, or come up with our own criteria on the spot. This is where you might have heard about "the most good" or "good for the most people" or "harms the fewest people" or does the least harm." These are some of the criteria people use to resolve ethical dilemmas. The grey areas are what leaders really get paid for; the black/white areas are easiest for anyone to resolve, but the grey areas are the real challenges. Great comment, Sgt Brendan Bigney!

My question was more in tune with the fact that in 1513 Niccolo Machiavelli published a book titled "The Prince". His thesis that "...the the end justifies the means...." has become synonymous with a leader abdicating morality and ethics in the pursuit of power. Machiavelli opined that we can easily sacrifice our ethics to achieve what we see as a necessary end. Thus, as leaders we are in a constant struggle to maintain an ethical code at the expense of expediency. That struggle is very real and adhering to an ethical is not always easy.This is the context from where my question come from

perhaps I should be a little less with the reference - are you asking something like getting your humvee out for a mission with the fire extenguisher a day out of tolerance as opposed to it being months out of tolerance? while both are wrong, and should never happen, the sad truth is it does occur, and at that point an ethical decision needs to made.

LTC Orlando Illi - ok - thanks for clarifying - in that context the answer is an adamant no, at least when it came to my personal standards, the ends do not justify the means. Iin the scenario I gave with the fire extiguishers, it is a deadline, thus the vehicle could not go, have I been over ruled on something like that, absolutely, but I know that I did the hard right over the easy wrong.

utilizing the ideology of Machiavelli would make us no better than the people and groups that we oppose, it justifies any atrocity committed in the name of the end goal. Nuking Bagdhad to eliminate Hussein would fall into that.