Rules of War, should there be any?

Great Debates
1

I am asking here and not in GD because I don’t want a heady debate, just a general feel for what other people think.

The current example, of course, is the Israel-Gaza thing going on (and please, let us not make this thread about that), but the topic has come up every single time country A throws a stone at country B. “The stone was too big”, “You should only use rounded stones”, “Why use stones when they only have sticks”.

I say bullshit the whole lot of it. Once a country decides that there is no other way than to wage war against another, war means beating the shit out of that other country until they can no longer threaten you. If that means a single bomb with pinpoint accuracy, big savings to you. If that means razing the whole country to a dust bowl, tough luck to all.

Isn’t the whole thing of a “clean” war a ridiculously hypocritical oxymoron?

  • FTR, I am strongly anti-war and very strongly against what Israel is doing in Gaza. I don’t want either of these two particular facts to color this thread, though.
2

Well; there are Rules of War. They’re among others, called the Geneva Convention, the Hague Protocol and the Geneva Protocol.

The problem with having no rules is, that it isn’t all that popular anymore to pound the civilian population of a country into a pulp. You kinda want to avoid that, if only to avoid international outrage.

3

The only rule of war I recognize, above and beyond that of Geneva convention is simple.

Minimize civilian suffering and loss, while taking the fastest possible course of action to end a war.

4

I’m no expert on military matters, but I think that the general approach tends to be either “win at all costs” in which case there are usually heavy casualties on both sides, or “fight by certain rules” which work to minimize casualties while still establishing superiority. An extreme example of this would be like the biblical story of David versus Goliath; by choosing champions to settle the score, the competing armies saved countless lives. Since most people are not eager to see widespread massacres or reports of torture, some sort of rules of conduct prevail.

5

The current Rules of War were derived from the experience of Europe from about the year 1500 to 2000. In that environment you had a) ordinary people who lived there & didn’t much give a shit about the boss du jour , b) bosses who wanted to rule ze vorld, c) fighting folks glad to work for a boss if it meant a little more cash & maybe a chance to hurt other people. Also, suicide was never part of the social / ethical / religious tradition. As a general rule, people always tried to avoid dying. Finally, up until very late, they lacked the capability to kill ALL of a population or render ALL the land useless.
So in that environment, after hostilities ended most of the ordinary people & their farms & towns & such would still be there & they’d go back to their lives. The losing boss would be replaced with another one, and the majority of the fighters went back to not being hostile with anyone, while a few turned to crime to keep getting their violence fix. Then, 20-50 years later, let’s do it all again.

In that environment, the goal is to contain conflict to “it’s just business” as much as possible. Killing all the serfs, or torturing all the enemy POWs is shortsighted in that it doesn’t really improve your ability to win, but it does make managing the post-war environment a lot harder.

Now fast forward to the 21st century. Those sorts of conflicts are largely passe, mostly becasue the serfs now rule in most modern countries & they’ve broken the code that wars are fun for bosses but not for serfs.

So conflicts now are either between countries that haven’t gotten that clue yet, or people fighting what are mostly wars of revenge. Most Palistinians couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Judaism versus Islam. But the care a lot that some guy from Them shot their brother & bulldozed their house. Likewise the typical Israeli is a lot more bent about dead neighbors than they are about the details in ancient books.

In that environment, the Rules of War are more, not less important. Only when the cycle of revenge is broken do we begin to have a fire small enough that we can put it out and/or they can let it go out.
Finally, we see assymetric warfare with non-state actors, e.g. Al Qaeda. The traditional Rules of War recognized that both sides faces the common problem of being on the receiving end of the other’s violenec, and of having to manage a post-war environment after they won (they hope). That drove a certain amount of rational calculation into both side’s thinking.

From a Western POV, Al Qaeda is essentially nihilist. All they want is dead Westerners. Their concept of an ideal postwar environment IS one where everyone is either honestly converted, or dead. And they expect that to be a 2%/98% proposition. They also hope/expect God will help them with the pesky logistics of killing hundreds of millions of people. (Can you imagine the stench)

So they have little incentive to play be the traditional rules. And which they see as stacked against their style of warfare.
A valid question in any contest is whether to play by the Rules when your opponent does not. Setting aside the legal issue of treaty obligations, it comes down to a complex balance of benefits. But for any ratioanl state actor, the practical reality that you’re gonna get stuck managing the postwar environment, which will last a lot longer than the war ever did.

So assuming your country’s very survival doesn’t hinge on this decision, you take the long view & play by the Rules. When your survival is at stake, then you cheat. Hence the Cold War doctrine of Massive Retaliation.

And there you have it: a potted one semester course in the Rules of War.

6

So is the soldiers rape the women, that’s OK?

If the captured people are taken as slaves, that’s OK?

7

My general thought now is, in modern war, you seldom care for the land or the people you are fighting. If you do, then it is a land grab and you are one of the baddies anyways. It seems that most current wars are about making X stop from happening.

If X is nuclear development, then you send a single missile, turn the reactor to rubbish and call it a night. Baddies are foiled, people is happy.

If X is wave after wave of suicide bombers, then you might have to wipe out the entire population of that country/location since killing the current crop only makes the next crop more determined to attack you.

If X is bad boss abusing the locals, then it is harder since the baddies are among the locals you want to save and you need to limit collateral damage. Still, executions of captured baddies and many other unpleasantries might be desirable to one’s end.

If X is a civil war, then you are royally screwed and the winning move is not playing, if that’s an option.

I don’t think we are at a time in history where symmetrical war is an option. Meet you at the field, bring your best troops is no longer the way we fight anyone. War will always be messy and you might as well bring the biggest stick you can wield without hurting yourself.

8

Raping women and enslaving prisoners is not the kind of stuff that will make a war end, is it?

ETA: Those are not actions of war, that’s the stuff of petty minds wanting to see suffering.

9

If you didn’t wish to debate, you should not have debated.

Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.

10

No. That is a very simplistic Playstation way of looking at war. Countries exercise restraint during war for the very simple reason that at some point hostilities will end. It makes the peace aterwards a bit easier if the general population doesn’t have years of attrocities fresh in their mind.

Of course, the problem with war is that it tends to escalate. People tend to forego the rules if it comes down to a matter of rules vs victory.

If one were ruthless enough, one could argue that raping and pillaging and otherwise terrorizing the population is a valid strategy if it forces a more rapid capitulation.

Of course, history has shown that this generally has the opposite effect and simply intensifies your enemies resolve.

11

The problem with your theory, as applied to modern warfare, is that it pretty much means “if a country pisses you off, nuke it into a glass parking lot”. I’m sure you can see the implicit drawback.

12

Rule no.1 -no war. It is a failure of diplomacy and should be a rare event.

13

It doesn’t have to be. Specially not if it is your neighbor and you are downwind. You only need to one-up your opponent, not go all-out.

Plus the obvious drawback that only the biggest fish in the pond gets to play that game and with Mutual Assured Destruction there is no such thing.

14

  1. There is no more MAD. The Russians would not automatically assume a launch is meant for them. Especially in the case of sub-launched missiles, which would reach their targets before anyone could confirm a launch.

  2. You said it yourself.

If X is nuclear developpment, drop a single bomb ? Why ? They’ll just build another one. Might as well end the problem once and for all.

If X is suicide bombers, well, you said so yourself - genocide is the way to go, yay !

If X is a bad boss abusing the locals, and threatening us in the process, well, God will sort his own.

  1. You’re wrong and didn’t consider the implications of your proposition.
    The basis for the Rules of War is the Golden Rule - that which you don’t do to the enemy, he doesn’t do to you. It goes as far back as the Middle Ages, when nobles more or less agreed not to kill each other if it can be avoided, and try to keep peasants death to a minimum else everybody starves. Hence, prisonner care and ransoms.
    You want to protect your civilian population from chem attacks, you never use them and give the enemy the pretext to use them. You want your wounded to be taken care of should they be captured, you take care of the enemy wounded you capture. And so on and so forth.
    Whenever one side breaks one of the rules, that side implicitly condones the same done by the enemy (which, BTW, is why, while they were put to trial for this at the end of WW2, no German troops were ever convicted for false flag operations (wearing the wrong side’s uniform), since the Allies did it too). Which is also the reason why wars tend to get bloodier and messier the longer they drag on.
    In other words, if you forget every rule and ethical principle, you can expect the enemy to retaliate in kind. See : Palestine/Israël
15

(Gah, LSL had said it before, and much more eloquently. I really should get some sleep)

16

I always found the rules of war to be questionable. Seems those with power are the ones writing those rules and bending them to fit their needs.
I’m sure in WWII Japan wouldn’t have agreed that using a couple A-Bombs with massive civilian casualties in retaliation for bombing a US naval base was “all fair”.
But I guess if the US justified it within their rules it must have been OK.

17

Since this is now a debate (as per mod decision)…

(ETA: This is in response to Kobal2)

FTR, I am by no means advocating more and more violent wars. I consider myself a “mediumcore” pacifist. It is just that I cannot stop rolling my eyes at the usual arguments about the use of certain tactics in war. In both the cases of the US in Iraq and Israel in Gaza, to cite just the two most recent (heck even add Russia in Georgia et al), although I have always been against the attacker, I see no objection to them using overwhelming force (even though I object to the attack in the first place).

Precisely because wars get bloodier the longer they run, I think that striking first and striking hard is the way to make wars short and bloody to only one side (the other, of course).

And also because the “Golden Rule” doesn’t always keep (does it ever?) and the enemy in these modern asymmetric wars is always playing dirty, why bother at all with trying to keep a semblance of fairness when you can just squash them on first strike?.

I think the winning strategy in Iraq was not to fight, of course. I think we have by now agreed that there is no good way to fight a civil war. But in the cases of Afghanistan and Gaza, scorching the land would have reached the purpose of the war in less time and with a lot less suffering.

18

Well, sure, you could have scorched the land. You could have flattened every building, killed every man and chemed every field. If you wanted every single Muslim country, heck, every civilized country to consider America dangerous, insane and openly evil. If you wanted to break all treaties and alliances. If you wanted everyone cheering *for *Al Qaeda.

The problem with the reasoning “well, they don’t play fair so why should we ?” is that it’s a race to the bottom. As LSL already said, it also only exacerbates hatred, it doesn’t put an end to them.
Also, they don’t play “fair” because they can’t win by playing fair. Asymmetric warfare is what happens when one side has every advantage over the other. They have assault rifles and walky-talkies. You have B2 strategic bombers and satellites so advanced they can spot the mole on my ass. There’s really no incentive for them to go all Light Brigade, is there ? They fight that way because it’s what they know works. It worked against the Brits, it worked against the Russians, and it’ll work against you, too.

And finally, what exactly do you think would be have been conducive to “squashing them on first strike”, outside of indiscriminate, total genocide ? (cause y’know… even Hitler picked and chose. Just sayin’, Godwin be damned :wink: )

19

On a practical level, what would be the benefit of doing away with the “rules of war”? Sure, sometimes wars would end quicker, but on the whole it would mean more suffering and death.

I mean, we could just go ahead and nuke all our enemies, but I don’t think it would be worth the damage to our standing in the international community. At some point even acting out of pure self-interest it still benefits you to consider “What will people think of us if we do this?”

20

War often involves a Prisoner’s Dilemma type situation, and the “Rules of War” are partly intended to prevent a degeneration to the worst possible outcome.

Take chemical weapons. If one side can use them without the otherside retaliating, the user may gain a significant advantage (without getting into the actual practicalities of use of such weapons). However if both sides use them, the outcome is worse for both parties than if neither had employed such weaponry.

The Nash equilibrium is therefore that both sides will gas the crap out of one another. A rule against chemical warfare is therefore an attempt (presumably accompanied bya credible trigger strategy informing the likely opponent that if they use gas, so will we) to avoid a shift to the Nash equilibrium, and keep killing people by civilized means such as bullets and bombs, rather than dissolving their lungs or blistering their skin away.