<<Re: Raping and looting: After all, that often increases the morale of the conquering troops and further demoralizes the conquered civilians, which seems to be what we’re advocating.>>
I think that history shows that units that descend into debauchery such as that don’t respond well to their officers, lose discipline, and quickly become ineffective in battle. Cases in point: Several Einsatzgruppen units on the eastern front, and at least one SS unit in WWII, in the Warsaw uprising, had to be taken to the rear because the troops were so busy raping and looting they forgot about their mission.
A Confederate Brigade under Jubal Early, I think, looted a Town in Pennsylvania later in the war, and wasn’t worth much after that.
The Serbian Army.
Just to clarify some things…and I got my schooling in the Law of Land Warfare courtesy of the U.S. Army School of Infantry:
Descending paratroopers are fair game, as are evacuating armored vehicle crewmen. Airmen bailing out of disabled aircraft are not fair game, and must be allowed to land safely unless they attempt to resist capture.
Note that these are within the interests of the countries and soldiers encountering them as well: A live pilot and officer will have intelligence value, bargaining chip value, and propaganda value. A dead one will not.
Another principles of the law of land warfare: Generally speaking, a unit or soldier has the right to defend himself. Political considerations aside, for the moment, he is not expected to let the fear of collateral damage prohibit him from accomplishing his mission and the mission of his unit. But any experienced soldier knows that gratuitous cruelty has a political cost, and can in the long term compromise the mission of the unit. The Serbs learned this lesson well in Kosovo, when their wanton cruelty provoked NATO to intervene against them.
Refraining from this wanton cruelty, in the long run, would have been in their best interests. Certainly, it would have resulted in a better deal than they got…a lot of their own guys dead or wounded, an economy and infrastructure in ruins, and foreign troops on their own soil.
Russian cruelty toward German prisoners in WWII also ultimately worked to their disadvantage, as hopelessly outnumbered German formations fought to their deaths, taking tens of thousands of Russians with them, rather than surrender. Still other German formations…entire divisions, when all was lost, killed a bunch of Russians fighting their way west in a desparate effort to surrender to American and British units, rather than to the Russians. Meanwhile, by late 1944 and early 1945, encircled Germans were surrenduring by the tens of thousands to American support columns, in the knowledge that the Americans, generally speaking, would honor the Geneva convention.
As a result, first of all, tens of thousands of American lives were saved. Second, Americans occupying Germany and Japan and Italy did not have near the pesky partisan problems that the Japanese did in the Phillipines, and that the Germans did in Russia and Poland and Yugoslavia during the war, as a result of their monstrous cruelty.
German and Japanese war aims would have been better served by a more reasonable, restrained policy that discouraged murder, torture, looting and rape. Instead, in many cases (though not all), their commands at least tacitly tolerated this behavior.
A notable exception: Erwin Rommel would not tolerate violations of the Law of Land warfare under his command. Not coincidentally, as a professional soldier par excellence, he was consistently among the most effective commanders in the Wehrmacht.
Again, when he had enough in hand to mount offensive operations (before El Alamein), when British formations became encircled, they would surrender rather than fight practically to the last breath, as the Germans did at Stalingrad. That’s one reason why the Stalingrad siege lasted months and cost millions dead, while the siege of Tobruk took only a few short weeks before the British capitulated to the Afrika Korps.
We have the Law of Land Warfare, and as an officer I enforce it, because it is ultimately in the best interests of my soldiers and my command and my country for me to do so. It saves lives on both sides.
We also enforce it because we are an army of a Democratic Republic and that is something I never want my soldiers to forget.
And personally, I enforce it also because it is the law, and because it’s the right thing to do. It really isn’t rocket science.